After a promising opening, this coming-of-age romance from director Megan Park fails to deliver the big finish
This movie from Canadian director Megan Park starts very well; it is an apparent body-swap adventure with plenty of promised laughs featuring Aubrey Plaza, and her billed presence alone made it one of the autumn’s most attractive-seeming films. But mystifyingly, dismayingly, My Old Ass morphs into a gloopy, droopy, soupy young adult fantasy romance which finally fails to deliver its own ending, and we are denied the actual big finish, without which the entire story has been a pointless waste of time. (I suspect an earlier script-draft had that ending but Park had second thoughts.)
Park imagines a teen called Elliott (Maisy Stella), whose parents run a cranberry farm; it’s the end of the summer and she is about to begin university at Toronto, but is enjoying a glorious romance with a girl who works at a coffee shop. Then Elliott does shrooms with a couple of friends and has a wacky epiphany/vision: her supercool, cynical 39-year-old self, played by Plaza, appears to her. After a lot of freaked-out conversation, including an assessment of the relative firmness of their respective asses, and with much grumpy and adult-teen resentment from older Elliott at this enforced intimacy with her past self, she finally agrees to give young Elliott a piece of advice: stay away from a guy called Chad. And the next day, once Elliott has awoken from what she is now convinced was merely a lucid dream, she meets-cute with a guy called Chad (Percy Hynes White) who is super annoying but super nice and … well … you know.
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