There are a few tried and true staples of the American high school: yellow buses, homecoming, prom, the social safari that is the school cafeteria. And with each micro-generation, raunchy teen movies about trying to get some or remain a loser for life. Incoming, a new Netflix teen film from The Mick creators Dave and John Chernin, is the latest attempt to revive the type of outrageous R-rated comedy that Hollywood now makes in fits and starts. Like last year’s No Hard Feelings, Joy Ride or Bottoms, it’s trying to channel the unfiltered debauchery of American Pie or Superbad, but for kids born after both of those movies premiered. (I’ve realized with horror that fall’s freshmen, born in 2010, are the first of gen alpha to enter high school.)
As in both of those antecedents, Incoming focuses on one pod at the bottom of the food chain: nerdy freshman boys who haven’t grown yet. Benj Nielsen (an endearing Mason Thames) and his friends – Connor (Raphael Alejandro), Eddie (Ramon Reed) and Danah “Koosh” Koushani (Bardia Seiri) – all look like children, in a school populated with boorish proto-men played by actors in their late 20s. The plot in this 91-minute film is admirably slight and brass-tacks: Benj, a former theater kid trying to rebrand, is in love with his older sister Alyssa’s (Ali Gallo) best friend Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), but she’s a sophomore and cool; Koosh needs to prove himself to his older brother Kayvon (Kayvan Shai), a sociopathic senior who regularly beats him up, by hooking up with someone. Kayvon’s blowout party for the first weekend of school offers an ideal opportunity for both schemes, plus plenty of Project X-style hijinks.
Though Incoming has a decent handle on the raucous momentum of a high school party and the crass dialect of freshman boys (Koosh says the party will have “an insane dong-to-puss ratio”), the film has the consistently distracting sheen of a made-for-streaming film, making for cheap comparison to its inspirations. And its sensibility-pushing schtick works significantly less well than some of its peers, most notably Netflix’s biting Do Revenge or Paramount’s Honor Society, both self-conscious throwbacks to blockbuster teen movies that lean into the campy satire side of the canon.
Incoming also strives for ridiculous caricature – Alyssa has an openly acknowledged nose job as a sophomore, Benj’s monstrous senior carpool buddy (Thomas Barbusca) ropes him into a drug deal, Koosh installs a high-quality surveillance system to spy on potential targets for a “meet-cute” – that land as more cringe than funny. That’s especially the case for Bobby Cannavale as the jocular chemistry teacher so desperate for past glory and validation that he attends, then passes out at the party – a waste of the actor’s palpable charisma and comedic timing on a character used only for pity laughs.
As veterans of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the Chernin brothers work in touches of the long-running sitcom’s beloved shithead debauchery, most obviously by casting Kaitlin Olson as Benj and Alyssa’s mom, a concerned parent stuck at maximum volume. Incoming works best when that sensibility meets a touch of sweetness – poor Benj’s nerves when he accidentally ends up in a K-hole, the bond of girls taking selfies while they pee in the yard, drunk girl babbling or the revelations made in the post-party haze. Unfortunately, those touches are outweighed by attempts at gross-out shock – a broken bone or, most egregiously, a subplot involving Connor and Eddie taking a blackout drunk popular senior girl (Loren Gray) to Taco Bell and enduring a bowel disaster so disgusting I nearly turned the movie off.
The over-reliance on poop jokes for half the movie admittedly burned through much of my goodwill, though not all of it. When the kids are not having an all-out brawl, attempting to scheme drug deals or enduring a literal shit storm, little moments of chemistry, particularly between an appealing Thames and believably cool Ferreira, allow the movie to not feel like a writing exercise for an R-rating. The Chernins are savvy enough to not wrap the whole thing in a neat “just be yourself” bow in the end, but Incoming could have worn a little more of its heart on its sleeve.
It’s understandable, even thematically fitting, that the new Netflix teen comedy Incoming looks up to Superbad like a younger brother idolizing his cool older siblings. Superbad may not itself be about the cool kids, but in terms of one-wild-night teen comedies, it’s just about the funniest and best-made version we’ve seen so far this century—something for any comic filmmaker to admire. So when Incoming rips it off, it’s hard to sustain much ill will. In fact, quite the opposite: The movie’s aspirations earn it a line of credit that it may not actually deserve.
Reversing the vantage of Superbad’s about-to-graduate seniors, Incoming centers on four insecure friends who have just begun their freshman year of high school. Otherwise, the characters line up pretty easily: Benj (Mason Thames) is the sweetly nerdy Michael Cera type nursing a longtime crush on Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), his year-older sister’s bestie; Danah (Bardia Seiri) is the Jonah Hill wannabe wild man, whose older brother is throwing a school-kickoff rager, where both he and Benj hope to get lucky and cement their high-school coolness; and Eddie (Ramon Reed) and Connor (Raphael Alejandro) share the McLovin-style side adventure, as two nerdier guys who don’t make it to the party and wind up driving around all night instead. (Connor even gets an immediate nickname, albeit a less triumphant one, not of his choosing.)
These aren’t the only story threads running through Incoming, which writer-directors Dave and John Chernin sometimes let wander into a Can’t Hardly Wait-style ensemble. Bobby Cannavale is on hand as a cool but lonely science teacher who winds up partying with his students, essentially doing a longer-form version of the Saturday Night Live “Party Song” video from a few years back. Eddie and Connor wind up chauffeuring around a drunken Katrina (Loren Gray), the school’s most popular online influencer; Benj’s sister Alyssa (Ali Gallo) starts to come to terms with her own insecurities; lots of people learn, or half-learn, to be themselves, rather than trying to be cool.
Are these running gags or full-fledged subplots? It’s hard to say. Some of them are kind of funny, and hardly any of them outright bomb—but nothing really kills, either. The Chernins, veterans of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, are clearly trying to work in the anything-goes mode of outrageous R-rated comedy, full of profane one-liners and the lovably reckless behavior of youth—only here, much of the worst behavior is haphazardly staged, conveniently elided, or anonymized into montages of characters we don’t actually know. It’s fine that Incoming is missing the bullying or gross-out gags that make so many “classic” teen comedies far less rewatchable than Superbad. Unfortunately, it’s also missing crucial comic timing, which consistently throws the movie off, even when its runtime barely passes 80 minutes before the credits roll.
The clunkiness starts with the dialogue, which often sounds canned rather than improvised. (Though Superbad was more tightly scripted than it appeared, much of it sounded thrillingly like it was rattled off straight from its leads’ brains.)
Fair enough that none of these actors are as seasoned as a young Cera or Hill; the bigger problem is that they’re unsupported by the Chernins’ direction. Comic reversals, like a conflict that ping-pongs between an impending fight and chumminess, are mistimed, stepping on punchlines. Payoffs vary from predictable to nonexistent to weirdly punishing; the movie’s attempts at larger-scale slapstick aren’t calibrated for sight-gag hilarity, and characters suffer injuries that feel weirdly real even as they exist in a cartoonish realm. The movie often feels as if it’s second-guessing itself, unsure if it wants to exact pitiless humiliations upon its characters, or reward them for being essentially nice people.
In all the commotion, the movie shortchanges its most appealing element: Benj’s dawning suspicion that Bailey might actually like him back, further complicated (though not really enough) by his sister’s mean-girl hostility. Thames and Ferreira aren’t especially hilarious in their roles, but they do convey the nervous excitement of young love, and their final moment together has unexpected rom-com zing. That final flicker of a sweet-tart ending also functions as a moment of clarity, revealing just how uninterested Incoming has been in taking its own advice about chilling out and being yourself. Whatever this movie’s authentic identity could have been, it doesn’t seem like an outrageous party flick is the right fit.
