Barely Lethal Needed More Samuel L Jackson And Jessica Alba

It may not be a new phenomenon – in fact, I’m fairly certain it isn’t – but I’m becoming increasingly irritated by movies deciding that it’s a good idea to mention other, better movies while they’re playing. Take Barely Lethal, for example, which makes reference to both Mean Girls and The Breakfast Club. Whenever one of these references pops up, I began to reminisce about those movies, and wondered why I was wasting my time watching Barely Lethal when I could be re-watching either of those superior high school movies. The plot, which is essentially straight out of Kick-Ass 2, sees a teenage girl, Agent 83 (Hailee Steinfeld), who has been trained as an assassin for her entire life, faking her own death in order to become a foreign exchange student and become a “normal” teenager. She adopts the name “Megan” and begins trying to fit in at the high school – except that she has been trained as an assassin for her entire life and therefore isn’t exactly adept at acting like a typical teenage girl. It doesn’t help that Hailee Steinfeld struggles to carry the movie. Her post-True Grit career, so far, probably hasn’t turned out as well as anyone had hoped, but this is just another poor performance in another weak movie among a sea of both. It’s mostly just disappointing because we know she has a ton of talent, but it just hasn’t been showcased particularly often. In a supporting role, we get Samuel L. Jackson as the lead instructor and head of the assassin organization that trained Agent 83. Jackson is as fun as always but he’s not in the film a whole lot. Jessica Alba shows up as eye candy and as a villain, but she, too, isn’t in Barely Lethal much. It’s like the filmmakers really wanted to make Hailee Steinfeld the star, but instead of using the veteran actors to bolster her performance by giving her someone to play off, they far too often than not left her alone – or with even weaker actors. I took as much time as I reasonably could in order to try to figure out if there was anything redeeming about Barely Lethal, and I struggled to think of anything. Nothing that we see is bad enough to actively hate it, and its running time isn’t exceptionally long, so both of those are positive, but only slightly. “It’s not horrible enough to hate” is hardly a good thing to say, especially when it’s all still bad. That’s basically what it comes down to, at least for me. It’s not a good movie, and it’s not one that’s in any way, shape, or form worth watching, but it’s not one of the worst things you can see. It exists and you can watch it, but it’s probably in your best interest to simply ignore it. Maybe watch one of the better movies it references, like The Breakfast Club or Mean Girls. Bottom Line: Barely Lethal has a potentially intriguing premise that gets wasted on boring high school cliches and references to much better movies. Recommendation: Unless you loved the “assassin goes to high school” subplot of Kick-Ass 2 and wanted an entire movie based around that, skip Barely Lethal and watch something better, like The Breakfast Club or Mean Girls. [rating=1.5]