Best friends, Neil and Gilbert start their senior year of high school with high hopes and aspirations. Neil has always fantasized about being cool enough to date his long time crush and Gilbert has always dreamed of being a social media super star. After what is, by all accounts, a very disappointing and embarrassing first day in school, Neil makes a magical wish to be cool just at the magical moment when the clock strikes 11:11. The next morning, Neil wakes up to a reality that is straight from the comics of his dreams.
The premise of Supercool is that if you make a wish at 11:11 it’ll somehow come true. I, for one, whished this movie had never been made during the entirety of its 1:31:54. It opens with a man in a hockey mask firing a machine gun at a school bus; as it turns out, this is the protagonist’s fantasy, but it’s nevertheless in horrible taste. Then again, this is a movie that still believes projectile vomiting is funny (memo to director Teppo Airaksinen: it’s not; it has never been and it never will be).
The main character’s wish morphs him into a more conventionally attractive male model type, so that the movie can subject us to that old, tired shtick where he has to persuade his best friend that it’s really him by fielding questions the answers to which only he and the friend would know. Yawn. Moreover, Airaksinen does the Quantum Leap mirror thing: actor Jake Short plays Neil at all times except when he looks in the mirror, on which occasions he sees, as do we, the likeness of actor Josh Cranston. Now, imagine for a second, if you will, that Tom Hanks only appears in the movie Big whenever (then) child actor David Moscow gazes at a reflective surface, and you’ll have an idea of just how dumb Supercool actually is.
The oddest thing is that Neil does not, in fact, whish for an extreme makeover; what he does wish for is a “Second chance with Summer”, Summer being the girl he likes so much that he apparently can’t help emptying the contents of his stomach all over her. This may well be the most clueless version of the Careful What You Wish For trope I’ve ever seen, but in any case, Neil predictably learns that looks aren’t everything yada yada yada. What he does not learn, however, is that the sexually objectifying drawings he makes of Summer are as offensive as his high school bus shooting fantasy – but then, she doesn’t seem to care either way. Maybe Summer should wish for a second chance too.
