Rebel Wilson’s campy musical is a mixed bag

When Maeve (Charlotte McGuinness) is suspended from school for political demonstrations, her mother (Susan Pryor), who is also the school principal, sends the Sydney teenager to the Australian outback to live with her. She lives with her cousin Tyra (Natalie Abbott).

Dunburn, the fictional location of Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut Deb The setting is a small town recovering from years of drought and state ministry failure. Local governments are desperate for money to maintain water supplies, so in one of the film’s more humorous jokes, they resort to creating a viral video to draw attention to their plight. Of course, none of these questions concern Maeve, who is already plotting an escape when she arrives at Dunbourne.

Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Deb Documenting Maeve’s fish-out-of-water adventures in Dunburn. Upon arrival, the cosmopolitan teen loudly rejected the town’s regressive traditions. In particular, Maeve regrets the annual debutante ball that Tyra dreams of attending. She couldn’t understand why her cousin would succumb to such perverse pomp and circumstance. Of course, Maeve soon realizes that she can’t simply ignore the town or its people.

Deb Based on the critically acclaimed stage musical of the same name from Hannah Reilly (returning screenwriter) and Meg Washington (executive producer). It’s a contrived movie musical whose cultural self-awareness of teenage life might draw comparisons to this year’s movies mean girls musical arrangement, but its narrative owes much to muriel’s wedding. Tyra, like Muriel, is a country girl with a big heart who dreams of love and social acceptance—the kind of failed screen protagonists that have become increasingly common since P.J. Hogan’s 1994 premiere at TIFF .

Muriel wants to get married, while Tyra wants a date to attend a debutante ball, a tradition that makes her feel closer to her late mother. Her transformation and friendship with Maeve drive much of the film’s action and provide a heartwarming, predictable relationship that’s worth rooting for. It helps that McGinnis (who plays Maeve in the stage production) and Abbott fully embrace their characters and the exaggeration required of the film musical. Their performances, along with those of several other actors including Shane Jacobson as Tara’s father Rick and Tara Morice as a local tailor, are softening the more obvious designs in the film.

Aside from the acting, which leans into the absurd and amplifies the contrived nature of the film, Deb Difficulties were encountered in translating this to the screen. The music is a contemporary pastiche – riffing on different genres and arranged in a way that recalls the past. pitch perfect Covers – While a few are memorable, many are lost in thought with the closing credits. Wilson’s direction is equally uneven, especially toward the middle of the film, which contains convenient plot points to distract from the thin narrative. The result is an uneven pacing that threatens to ruin the more successful parts of the film.

Just like this year’s mean girls, Deb It does successfully utilize the tools of the social media age, adjusting the aspect ratio to mimic the iPhone and integrating the use of platforms like TikTok or Instagram into the storytelling. The film opens with an upbeat pop song (one of the film’s strongest), introducing Maeve’s world at an elite private school in Sydney. The new teenage experience involves documenting every aspect of their lives and engaging in plasticky mockery and cruelty.

The problem, of course, is that all these students are hypersensitive to injustice, so they hit people instead of hitting people. Maeve’s popularity in real life and online stems from her outspoken stance on feminist issues. But she’s also the quintessential bully, and her classmates are eager to erase her reputation after one of her political moves goes wrong. In the spirit of one of the most high-profile cancellations of the 21st century, Maeve retreated from public life to reflect.

The country air doesn’t suit us long-term city girls, so from the moment Maeve arrives at Dunbourne, she starts planning her departure. She plans to return to Sydney with a podcast documenting her life in the town and will start documenting all her interactions. She woos Tyra and uses her journey to Deb’s Ball as the main narrative, interviewing local mean girls Danielle (Brianna Bishop), Chantel (Karice Oka), Annabelle (Stevie Jean) and Annabelle’s mother, Janet (Wilson), a beautician who makes Regina George look angelic. As Maeve searches around town, she’s also hunted by a bad boy named Mickey (Hal Cumpston), about whom we learn very little.

a large part DebThe storyline revolves around Maeve keeping her podcast’s true intentions a secret while building a true friendship with Tyra, but the film is also jam-packed with other narratives. One involves the fate of Dunborn, who is in desperate need of government funds, and the other involves the love story between Rick and Sher (Morris), a small-town tailor. The cues are introduced with confident sets and catchy tunes, accompanied by decent choreography, but once the plot line demands more involvement, the balance is lost. Although it has a running time of 2 hours, parts Deb It can feel frustratingly shallow.

This would be forgivable if the rest of the movie were meaningfully coherent, but it’s not. DebLike Maeve’s experience at Dunbourne, it’s ultimately a mixed bag.