There are a few tried and true staples of the American high school: yellow buses, homecoming, prom, the social safari that is the school cafeteria. And with each micro-generation, raunchy teen movies about trying to get some or remain a loser for life. Incoming, a new Netflix teen film from The Mick creators Dave and John Chernin, is the latest attempt to revive the type of outrageous R-rated comedy that Hollywood now makes in fits and starts. Like last year’s No Hard Feelings, Joy Ride or Bottoms, it’s trying to channel the unfiltered debauchery of American Pie or Superbad, but for kids born after both of those movies premiered. (I’ve realized with horror that fall’s freshmen, born in 2010, are the first of gen alpha to enter high school.)
As in both of those antecedents, Incoming focuses on one pod at the bottom of the food chain: nerdy freshman boys who haven’t grown yet. Benj Nielsen (an endearing Mason Thames) and his friends – Connor (Raphael Alejandro), Eddie (Ramon Reed) and Danah “Koosh” Koushani (Bardia Seiri) – all look like children, in a school populated with boorish proto-men played by actors in their late 20s. The plot in this 91-minute film is admirably slight and brass-tacks: Benj, a former theater kid trying to rebrand, is in love with his older sister Alyssa’s (Ali Gallo) best friend Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), but she’s a sophomore and cool; Koosh needs to prove himself to his older brother Kayvon (Kayvan Shai), a sociopathic senior who regularly beats him up, by hooking up with someone. Kayvon’s blowout party for the first weekend of school offers an ideal opportunity for both schemes, plus plenty of Project X-style hijinks.
Though Incoming has a decent handle on the raucous momentum of a high school party and the crass dialect of freshman boys (Koosh says the party will have “an insane dong-to-puss ratio”), the film has the consistently distracting sheen of a made-for-streaming film, making for cheap comparison to its inspirations. And its sensibility-pushing schtick works significantly less well than some of its peers, most notably Netflix’s biting Do Revenge or Paramount’s Honor Society, both self-conscious throwbacks to blockbuster teen movies that lean into the campy satire side of the canon.
Incoming also strives for ridiculous caricature – Alyssa has an openly acknowledged nose job as a sophomore, Benj’s monstrous senior carpool buddy (Thomas Barbusca) ropes him into a drug deal, Koosh installs a high-quality surveillance system to spy on potential targets for a “meet-cute” – that land as more cringe than funny. That’s especially the case for Bobby Cannavale as the jocular chemistry teacher so desperate for past glory and validation that he attends, then passes out at the party – a waste of the actor’s palpable charisma and comedic timing on a character used only for pity laughs.
As veterans of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the Chernin brothers work in touches of the long-running sitcom’s beloved shithead debauchery, most obviously by casting Kaitlin Olson as Benj and Alyssa’s mom, a concerned parent stuck at maximum volume. Incoming works best when that sensibility meets a touch of sweetness – poor Benj’s nerves when he accidentally ends up in a K-hole, the bond of girls taking selfies while they pee in the yard, drunk girl babbling or the revelations made in the post-party haze. Unfortunately, those touches are outweighed by attempts at gross-out shock – a broken bone or, most egregiously, a subplot involving Connor and Eddie taking a blackout drunk popular senior girl (Loren Gray) to Taco Bell and enduring a bowel disaster so disgusting I nearly turned the movie off.
The over-reliance on poop jokes for half the movie admittedly burned through much of my goodwill, though not all of it. When the kids are not having an all-out brawl, attempting to scheme drug deals or enduring a literal shit storm, little moments of chemistry, particularly between an appealing Thames and believably cool Ferreira, allow the movie to not feel like a writing exercise for an R-rating. The Chernins are savvy enough to not wrap the whole thing in a neat “just be yourself” bow in the end, but Incoming could have worn a little more of its heart on its sleeve.