REVIEW: Coke Adds Life -- Just Not to Take Me Home Tonight

It's bad enough that Michael Dowse's retro-comedy Take Me Home Tonight isn't nearly as much fun as the '80s actually were. Even worse, it's less fun than most '80s comedies were -- and that's bad. Topher Grace plays Matt, a recent MIT grad circa 1988, whose life is stuck on "pause": He's working a dead-end job at Suncoast Video, and he still has the hots for Tori (Teresa Palmer), the golden goddess who wouldn't look twice at him in high school and who barely looks once now. She comes into the store one day; he not-so-subtly puts the moves on her, telling her he works for Goldman Sachs (in the old days, this was supposed to drive girls wild). They agree to meet later at a huge Labor Day bash, where Matt will be able to perpetuate his silly lie and, with luck, win the girl.

If that killer premise isn't enough to get you to run, don't walk, to see Take Me Home Tonight, then maybe the presence of genius twinkie Anna Faris, as Matt's twin sister, Wendy, will be. But even if you, like me, would shove small children out of the way and knock over homeless people to watch Faris in a movie, think twice about braving this lazily conceived piece of junk for her sake alone: Faris appears in only a few scenes -- this is really Grace's show -- and she gets approximately one intentionally not-funny joke, which she repeats until it's three times as not-funny as it was the first time. She's also shot to look pudgy and blowsy, like a hausfrau in Marithe + Francois Girbaud.

I get that Dowse (Fubar, It's All Gone Pete Tong) isn't just mimicking '80s comedies; he's actually trying to make one, trusting, I suppose, that the audience is in on his ultra-ironic joke. The movie is badly lit and cheap-looking, presumably intentionally. But if modern audiences are really looking for sub-John Hughes, Adventures in Babysitting-caliber filmmaking, there's nothing to stop them from going straight to the source: You can pick up a treasure trove of this stuff for a few bucks from the revolving rack at your local convenience store.

Take Me Home Tonight ought to offer a little more than that. Instead, it grinds the ungodly awfulness of so many '80s comedy conventions into an even deeper rut. Matt and his best friend, Barry (Dan Fogler), steal a fancy car from Barry's former employer, the better to impress Tori. Numerous subplots emerge, bump uglies and then roll over and play dead: Matt and Barry find a bag of cocaine in the stolen car, which gets them into all kinds of trouble (and lands Barry in a bizarre little threesome); Wendy, who dreams of going on to Cambridge for graduate studies, nearly gets roped into marrying her dullard boyfriend, Kyle (Chris Pratt).

Nothing that happens in Take Me Home Tonight is surprising or affecting, and none of it is funny, either. The presence of a more charismatic leading man might have helped: Grace isn't a terrible actor -- he was perfectly charming in Robert Luketic's 2004 Win a Date with Tad Hamilton -- but his eager-beaver nerdiness wears thin pretty quickly in Take Me Home Tonight. (He does, however, still look young enough to play a convincing recent college grad; the movie was shot in 2007, presumably kept on the shelf all these years for its numerous depictions of rather ho-hum drug use.) The soundtrack packs on the old favorites -- "Safety Dance," "Come On Eileen," "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" -- but nothing can rouse the movie from its foggy nostalgic torpor. Take Me Home Tonight bites the big wang, and I don't mean Chung.