Although not exactly a brand new release, I don't think this has come out on home video here yet in the UK, so I still class this as a new release. Therefore topical. Therefore I hope you care. Oh yeah and it has Josh Hutcherson in it... enjoy!
Detention has some vague sort of plot, mainly in a killer fashioned on a brand new in universe movie who is on the loose and killing people from the high school and it eventually expands into a full on world ending threat narrative all the while keeping romance at the forefront. Really though Detention is about its own continuity and the characters who inhabit it, feeling a bit like a horror movie version of all the Avengers tie ins and the Avengers itself all made into one movie. Oh it also loves referencing better movies you could be watching, like Donnie Darko which seems one of the main influences for the film.
Our characters include 'Clapton Davis' played Hutcherson who is our lead boy and is supposed to be some kind of superhot, hipster bad boy? He is about four feet tall for Christ's sake, hell the movie even points this out. He has this weird thing for Patrick Swayze who influences both his main romance and action scenes. The female lead is Riley who has a massive crush on Clapton and is a high school no one who also seems considerably more self aware of how weird her surroundings are, while still accepting them for some reason.
Ione is our generic head cheerleader queen bitch archetype but her twist is that she is caught up in this whole time travel alien narrative, that ends up being a really central part to the films plot.
Billy is our star American Football player jock bully asshole archetype, only his twist is he is half fly, after he came in contact with an alien space rock.
There are a couple of Goth's who also work as our minority characters but I don't really get why they have as much screen time as they do.
A geek who is obsessed with Riley and that is basically his entire character....until the last half an hour or so, which really is best kept to be seen.
And a Canadian who seems to hate Riley because...reasons....whose twist I will also save for you to discover.
There is a black guy whose only character is to be boring.
And Elliot Fink who is basically Donnie Darko, who has been in detention for nineteen years trying to solve an equation that will predict the end of the world.
Oh and the whole plot is held together by time travelling, alien bear.
One of the oddest things is just that the film...works. Although it basically spends an hour hurling an unrelenting wall of...stuff at you. Violating you with a barrage of fourth wall breaks, bad jokes, text, mood changes, music, montages, murder, references to much better movies I could be watching instead, around an hour in, the film does slow down to start explaining and connecting all the pieces, and oddly it uses one odd piece of movie to explain another piece, which means that it has its own internal, thought out universe, which makes it a surprisingly clever movie and I can't even complain about it taking an hour to get here, because it makes the pay off just that much more sweeter.
So do I recommend it? For the first hour, I was ready to say I hated this movie, it was this confusing mess, nothing fit together, it was actually painful with how fast it was moving, like cinema whiplash and yet...mindblowingly the last half an hour or so takes every element in the last hour and finds a way to fit them all together, to make sense of it all, to create this internal and masterfully written continuity. Detention really isn't that good of a movie, constantly reminding me of movies I could be watching that I actually like, but it's worth a watch at least once, just to see it all come together because...just wow.
(wow this was a short review)
Think About It!
-Locke
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