We get Detention

A rampant, post-post-modern look at modern life through the lens of the high school slasher film/teen comedy, Detention is relentless in its determination to squeeze laughs (and shocks) from the pulpy guts of our self-aware culture. What does this mean for the average filmgoer? Well, it will help if you have a familiarity with the past 30 years of drugs, fashion, popular music, social media, science fiction, horror and the oeuvre of John Hughes—and have gone to high school. It’s a movie about movies, mostly, and director Joseph Kahn and former Coast film critic Mark Palermo throw everything they have at this thing. Though not all of it sticks—later bizarro plot developments including time travel, alien bears and going to the prom can’t quite sustain the amphetamine frenzy of the first act and I wish I cared more about the characters—the film has enough ideas to fill a dozen of your average multiplex entertainments.