Review of High School Musical (2006) by Rachel H — 10 Nov 2010

It has been four years since I saw this movie and I'm still figuring out why. There is nothing salvageable about this movie and yet I saw this and the other two. Through an elaborate series of words and exclamation points, I will try to explain that eponymous....why.

First of all, the performances sucked. These "teenagers" are almost as realistic as the "teenagers" on 90210. Had just about as many black people too (none in this movie except the token black kids played by Corbin Bleu and Monique Coleman). The two main leads (Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens) gave it their all, but they just don't provide any romance or character development. In terms of our antagonists, Ashley Tisdale and Lucas Grabeel are actually pretty good actors, and they were the only thing that were good about this movie. All in all, hiring a bunch of twentysomethings to play sixteen year olds is always a really bad idea, and this is especially shown in this movie.

The presence of plot is....meh. What I got from it was that popular athlete meets smart geeky new girl and they both try out for the school play. Enter theatrical antagonists who just provide satisfactory comic foil for our two protagonists to eventually get together at the end. The role of the token black teenagers is, I guess, to prevent our protagonists from getting together and to stick to the status quo (name of a song in the movie). All in all, just manufactured kiddie trash designed to make Disney money.

The songs, try as I did, could not escape from my head for at least a month after seeing this movie. They are so damn catchy it's unbelievable. They aren't even that good but the writers are geniuses in getting the songs to stay in the viewers' heads for weeks or even months after viewing. In terms of the singing voices of the cast, they're all pretty good, manufactured-sounding but good.

Before I conclude with my usual concluding paragraph, I am going to get on a small pedestal and say my piece about Zac Efron. In my opinion, he isn't that bad an actor and it was quite an accomplishment for him to get out of disney relatively unscathed and untypecast. Sure, Charlie St. Cloud sucked, but he was in that Orson Welles movie and he did well in that. I think it's great that he's trying to be a serious actor, even if all his endeavours aren't exactly succeeding. All in all, he's not a bad actor, and he's certainly the more tolerable protagonist in this movie (I'm talking to you Vanessa Hudgens!).

If you haven't seen this movie, you're one of the lucky ones. If you have...I can feel your pain. If you like this movie, I would be shocked if you aren't a teenage girl. I watched this movie at the time where I was the target audience for this movie, and I didn't like it one bit. Just skip this movie all together.