Movie review: 'What Goes Up' gets two thumbs down

What do you get when you assemble a cast of first-rate young actors with seasoned comedy professionals like Steve Coogan and “Saturday Night Live’s” Molly Shannon?

 

Coogan, a British comedian who grew up in an Irish family in Manchester, plays Campbell Babbitt, an emotionally damaged man who travels to New Hampshire to write a news report about the hometown of the first teacher to be selected for a Space Shuttle mission. Since “What Goes Up” is set in the late 1980s, we instantly realize that the Shuttle will be named Challenger and that the mission will end in an era-defining tragedy.

But before we have time to take in this fact, Babbitt discovers that his old college buddy has recently committed suicide. Soon he inherits the small group of grief-stricken students his dead friend taught at the local high school. Without their adored mentor they’re rudderless, immediately looking to Babbitt for a replacement.

Coogan can always be relied upon to deliver an edgy performance, and in “What Goes Up” he steals every scene he appears in. But in the end an underwritten script and often completely confusing direction undermine all his best efforts.

On the surface “What Goes Up” looks like a classic 1980s teenage angst film in the style of “The Breakfast Club” or “Pretty In Pink,”  but its over the top quirkiness also resembles classic high school outsider tales from the 1990s like “Election.” In the end you can see all of its influences, and also notice that it has failed to carve out its own niche.

As the dysfunctional students that Babbitt encounters, Hilary Duff, Josh Peck, and Olivia Thirlby do their best with the kind of over familiar teenage characters that populate this movie and seem to have been crafted to drive the storyline rather than take on any independent life of their own.

Duff and Thirlby are particularly underserved by their cutout characters. As a secretly pregnant teen who’s brimming with anger and resentment, you’d expect that Thirlby’s emotionally battered character would merit more screen time and at least some explanation, but it never comes.

Duff is also saddled with a flatfooted character (the references to “Romeo and Juliet” are particularly forced) who turns out to be less interesting than she at first appeared.

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Nster.com