Take Me Home Tonight (Review)

I don’t identify with the ’80s. This is probably because I wasn’t alive then. Still, I am able to have a certain affection for many past eras in pop culture history. Just about every other decade in recent memory has had an impact that I can wholly get behind. The ’80s don’t do that much for me. One thing I’ve noticed is that my favorite movies from the ’80s often don’t take place in the ’80s. Even Back to the Future had to escape to a different decade. This is part of the reason I can’t really get behind a film like Take Me Home Tonight. It’s a pleasant enough comedy with a charming cast, but it too often gets caught up in meaningless ’80s nostalgia.

Take Me Home Tonight not only flashes you back to the long-gone era of the 1980s, but also to the equally distant year of 2007, when the film was first shot and completed. It has sat on the shelf for nearly four years, and only now is it finally arriving at your local multiplex. The cast includes many names who seemed ready to explode back then, including Spider-Man 3 villain Topher Grace (who also co-conceived the story here), Anna Faris and Funny Fat Guy™ Dan Fogler. All of these actors are quite good, but their careers never really took off as expected. This makes the film feel quaint on a whole new level that wasn’t intended.

Grace plays Matt Franklin, a college graduate who is stuck working at a local video store and has no real plan for his life. When he bumps into his high school crush Tori Fredreking (Teresa Palmer), he pretends that he’s a banker with Goldman Sachs so that he may impress her. That same night, he goes to a party with his friend Barry (Fogler) and his sister Wendy (Faris). It is there he plans to win Tori over. Meanwhile, Barry does a lot of cocaine and gets into dance battles, and Wendy decides whether or not she wants to marry her boyfriend, played by a shockingly svelte Chris Pratt. (Reminder: this is pre-Parks and Recreation.)

Take Me Home Tonight takes place over the course of a single evening, and by morning all of the characters seem to have taken a step forward in their lives. This is to be expected, and the film never springs any surprises on you, but the cast is able to draw you in to their lives by the end. The film’s small victory is that it actually makes you care about where it’s going, even if you can draw the map yourself. Throw in a few cameos from the likes of Demetri Martin and Michael Ian Black to keep the comic momentum going, and you keep the movie from being a total loss.

The film’s aesthetics aren’t nearly as effective. Take Me Home Tonight just doesn’t look very good, and the ’80s pastiche becomes grating sooner rather than later. The soundtrack is saturated with songs even I know most of the lyrics to, and as such nothing new and/or exciting is said about the period. The grand statement of Take Me Home Tonight is that the ’80s definitely existed, and nothing beyond that. At least Hot Tub Time Machine, last year’s mediocre ’80s nostalgia comedy, had a reason to exist in its era. Take Me Home Tonight just thinks the whole decade was rad, so yeah. This might have been a more effective story if it was set in the modern era, but its almost 30-year-old setting renders the experience negligible.

There were too many factors working against Take Me Home Tonight for it to be anything more than pedestrian. Watching it, there’s the distinct feeling that something unwanted is being dumped upon us. It’s too agreeable to be outright dismissed, but it lacks the vitality that might have made it something pretty terrific. Everyone in Take Me Home Tonight emerges unscathed, but that’s almost more indicative of its non-impact. It comes and it goes.

Rating:  (out of 4)