BARELY LETHAL (2015)

Genre: Action/Comedy
Director: Kyle Newman
Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Jessica Alba, Samuel L. Jackson, Sophie Turner, Jamie King, Dan Fogler
Runtime: 1 hr 36 mins
Rating: PG13 (Some Sexual References)
Released By: Golden Village Pictures
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 16 June 2015

Synopsis: A teenage special ops agent (Hailee Steinfeld) coveting a "normal" adolescence fakes her own death and enrols in a suburban high school. She quickly learns that surviving the treacherous waters of high school is more challenging than international espionage.

Movie Review:

Just when you wonder what Nick Fury might be up to now that it’s been confirmed he won’t appear in the next Captain America film, along comes our answer in the form of a mashup between a teen secret agent movie and a high-school misfit comedy.

We’re talking about ‘Barely Lethal’, in which Samuel L. Jackson plays Hardman, the head instructor of the elite quasi-governmental secret training program known as the Prescott School for Girls. As Hailee Steinfeld’s opening voiceover informs us, Prescott trains orphaned girls to be elite secret agents from a very young age, and in case you’re wondering just why it isn’t a unisex facility, well that’s apparently because no one is likely to suspect a teenage girl for a spy.

Anyhow, Jackson seems right at home barking orders at his tween and teen charges, warning them about forming attachments and teaching them how to fight, kill, drive cars, and oh disarm bombs. Besides teaching them the ropes, Jackson also plays handler on all their missions – though compared to running S.H.I.E.L.D., let’s just say it is pretty much a walk in the park.

On one such mission meant to capture Victoria Knox (Jessica Alba), a former American expat turned deadly assassin, Jackson’s favourite teenage spy codenamed Agent 83 (Steinfeld) goes off the grid so she can experience life for the first time as a normal adolescent, or as normal as a diet of Hollywood movies such as ‘The Breakfast Club’, ‘Bring It On’ and ‘Clueless’ could have taught her. Assuming the identity of a Canadian exchange student by the name of Megan Walsh, she shacks up with a host family and enrols in a middle-American high school.

And just like that, what started off like ‘Mission: Impossible’ for teenage girls becomes another ‘Mean Girls’ wannabe, as Megan has to contend with an ‘AV nerd’ named Roger (Thomas Mann) with the hots for her, a cute musician named Cash (Toby Sebastian) who she (and seemingly every other girl in school) has the hots for, and a romantic rival named Heather (Sophie Turner) with murderous intents for her. Even before everything falls into place in the third act, you can already guess that Megan will eventually come to her senses and get together with Roger, and beat the sh*t out of Heather, so all that matters is whether the ride is fun.

Despite being conscious of clichés of the genre, screenwriter James D’Arco, who makes his feature screenwriting debut here, seems just as contend to trot out those same conventions that he purports to mock. Indeed, even as Megan references ‘Mean Girls’ to rebuff joining a group of cheerleaders at the lunch table, she falls head over heels for the too-cool-for-school dude who is clearly more into himself than into her, or is convinced by two conniving girls with similar designs on Cash to become the school mascot in order to win his heart.

The same can be said about how it makes Megan flip-flop between unflappable operative and awkward teen, nowhere more apparent than in a sequence when she and Heather are in a car talking about how the former’s shallow obsession for Cash right before Megan suddenly goes into agent mode and engages in a high-speed car chase with a fellow Prescott gone rogue. In more ways than one, D’Arco struggles to find the right balance, between sweet and self-aware or between savvy and stupid, and often instead works his film into a muddle.

On his part, director Kyle Newman, who is making his sophomore feature after the cult hit ‘Fanboys’, keeps the pace light and frothy enough to ensure that his target audience won’t get bored. Displaying no further ambition than a Disney Channel Original Movie, Newman puts his characters through the motion of a typical high-school genre picture while inserting stock action sequences that barely raise a pulse. If not for a spirited performance by Academy Award nominee Steinfeld (she of ‘True Grit’ fame), this comfort food for younger audiences aged 14 and below would even be more charmless.

Perhaps we should have taken a cue from the title, a not-quite-so-amusing riff on the porn label that selects and photographs models to emphasize their youth, to infer just what we should expect from ‘Barely Lethal’. At several points during the movie, Megan takes the opportunity to emphasise “if you think being an assassin is hard, try high school!”; well, it seems D’Arco’s screenplay doesn’t quite go beyond that intriguing pitch to justify mashing together two distinct genres that ought to have no business with each other, and which, coming after ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’, makes this teen spy movie even more unnecessary.

We get that running S.H.I.E.L.D. ain’t easy, but neither did we expect Nick Fury would opt for babysitting in between the Avengers’ downtime. Well, maybe that’s because fighting Jessica Alba beats fighting Ultron anytime. 

Movie Rating:

(A barely entertaining blend of spy movie and high-school comedy, this genre mashup is good only for girls below the age of 14)

Review by Gabriel Chong