That Awkward Moment, 2014.
Written and Directed by Tom Gormican.
Starring Zac Efron, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller, Imogen Poots, and Mackenzie Davis.
Haters gonna hate, but it’s really good to see Zac Efron back on the big screen. Despite kicking his career off with the much maligned High School Musical trilogy, Efron has proven time and time again that not only is he a solid and charismatic actor, but he’s also incredibly likeable. His personal demons have kept him at bay as of late but he’s looking to make a come back this year and his first step is the pretty unbalanced That Awkward Moment, from first time director Tom Gormican.
The main problem with The Awkward Moment is that it’s trying to be two different movies and it can’t find the balance between them. On the one hand it wants to be an early 2000-era Judd Apatow movie about three best friends who make a pact to stay single together but on the other hand it wants to be a conventional romantic comedy starring pretty boy Zac Efron. But not only does Gormican fail to get the mixture right, the movie also struggles to be either genre. It goes from gross-out humour to scenes of heart-felt sentiment and none of it gels.
This is a movie where having charismatic and entertaining central performances can only carry you so far. It’s not just Efron who effortlessly shines throughout the movie, but the chemistry between him, Michael B. Jordan and Miles Teller is superb and it’s quite clear that three have a good friendship off camera. Both Jordan and Teller are fantastic with Teller having a lot of fun with his Jonah Hill-esque role – although he feels like he’d be better suited to ‘nerdy friend’ as opposed to ‘hot-to-trot sex appeal’. And while this is a movie where the males are the central characters, there are also entertaining performances given by both Imogen Poots and Mackenzie Davis who act as the love interests for Efron and Teller. Davis and Teller’s relationship is by far the most interesting one of the three but it’s underdeveloped and haphazardly handled as the movie moves into its third act.
The writing is really what damages the movie as it just flounders along until its inevitable conclusion. The boys make a pact in the first act of the movie that they will all stay single together, but this isn’t brought up again until towards the end of the second act by which point it has become a bet. Only it’s a bet with no stakes or timeframe so it just feels like a pointless maguffin to provide some conflict between the three later on. It’s in moments like these that you realise that That Awkward Moment doesn’t really have a plot and is just a series of scenes that roll into one and other but don’t really have any impact, emotional or otherwise.
There is a good movie inside of That Awkward Moment, but some time spent on the script at its genesis on what it was trying to be would have helped greatly. It’s not funny enough to be a gross-out comedy and it’s not sweet enough to a decent love story. It feels as though Gormican was trying to add scenes in for both genders to make ‘the perfect date movie’ but it’s all so unbalanced. While they’re given good performances,t he male characters are over-blown cartoons of “lad culture” and the females are doormats they simply walk over and treat like garbage. This is not the best start for Efron’s resurgence. Let’s hope Neighbors fairs better…
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published February 5, 2014. Updated November 8, 2019.
