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Regrets. We’ve all had them, and a lot of them come from our high school years. What if we’d actually talked to the prom queen or tried out for the football team? What if you weren’t so mean to the fellow who’s now running his own company? Or what if you’d accepted the scholarship to be a star basketball player at a good university and brought your pregnant girlfriend with you? Would it be different, or should you quit it and just accept where you are? That’s the question 17 Again asks and answers.

Miss March (and now you know this review isn’t going to be pleasant) made a strong case for why it’s the Worst Movie of 2009. 17 Again was upset at that, and has decided it wants to make its case for Achievement In Cinematic Atrocity 2009. Let’s start with Offender #1, also named Jason Filardi. The only assumption I can make is that he had a marathon of Big, 13 Going on 30, and High School Musical 2 and decided he could write a rip-off staring Zac Efron. The only not terrible scene in the film involves Efron telling off Stan (Hunter Parrish) and someone Offender #2 messes up (more later.) This script is a complete joke, but not a funny one. Clearly I’m not the target audience for this piece of crap but even the people in my screening were scratching their heads wondering what they had been subjected to.

Offender #2, mentioned earlier, is Zac Efron, who is absolutely terrible as Mike O’Donnell. He looks confused in every scene as if the process of acting would fry his brain cells. He seems to think he’s making High School Musical again which required him to be over-the-top and loud. Here he’s asked to play things more subtly and the kid just can’t do it. Bill Milner is half his age and in two films is already acting circles around Efron. The reason Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks were tolerable when they were making films like these was because both had the chops to rise above the schlock that was written in the script (see Dragnet, Days of Thunder). They weren’t “just another face” in those films, as it appears that’s how Efron plays Mike.

The next person on the shitlist is Thomas Lennon, who is actually worse than his child counterpart. Tyler Steelman is the right kind of nerd that young Ned Gold requires, but Lennon is awful as adult Ned. Normally he’s enjoyable but here he’s helping to further the destruction of cinema. Really he’s not as much to blame as Offender #1 and director Burr Steers give Ned the silliest and most asinine stuff to do in the film. His character should come off as someone desperately trying to rail Mike’s principal (Melora Hardin, who was enjoyable in Hannah Montana) yet he comes off as comical as a third-rate David McCall. The only redeeming factors about him are his house, which is Geek Heaven and his bed, that’s shaped like a landspeeder. Otherwise the only reason to even be caught dead with this clown is because he has a seemingly endless supply of money.

On the dim side of things, Sterling Knight stretches his acting chops here as Alex O’Donnell. In fact I’d go as far as to say he’s better than the so-called leading man Zac. A lot of my enjoyment of Sterling is probably because I’ve only seen him as the ‘jock’ on “Sonny With A Chance” so to see him actually play something different and do it well was refreshing. His character is a more scaled-back version of Ned, but a lot less subtle and quiet. Michelle Tractenberg plays his sister Maggie and she’s a lot sexier than I remember her from “Buffy”. For instance the scene where she seduces Efron (yes, I know) she takes on the role of temptress very, very well while Zac painfully fights his true self. Playing the female provider for these children is Leslie Mann who essentially plays the role Judd Apatow always gives her, both in films and in their house. Then again if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and Leslie fits the position wonderfully. I’ve neglected to mention Matthew Perry because his role is nothing more than a cameo. It’s a shame because you almost wish this was a Big situation where Perry plays himself in high school. I’m surprised he even gets a billing considering how short his screen time is.

I can see the appeal of Hannah Montana for teenage girls, but that film was actually redeemable because Miley Cyrus and the cast elevated it. 17 Again has none of that and was done better when it was called Big, and even later when it was called 13 Going On 30. Efron is terrible, the script insults everyone’s intellegence, and everything that tries to redeem it still isn’t worth the effort. To be honest, I assumed everyone in my screening wasn’t seeing a film, but being subjected to refined forms of torture for captured Somali pirates.