HIGH School Musical 3: Senior Year lurches to the multiplex with a little something to irritate everybody. People looking for a resounding musical may resent being offered a Sunny Delight Grease instead. And people looking for a high school should be
ashamed.
High School Musical charts the continuing struggles of two teenagers: basketball hero Troy (Zac Efron) and his egg-headed girlfriend Gabriella (Vanessa Anne Hudgens), whose travails admittedly are hardly taxing. In the previous adventures, Troy has been artlessly wooed by another girl and had his head turned with a present of golf shoes, while Gabriella had to choose between musical auditions or a maths quiz. This time they are competing for a place at Juilliard against the sniping sister-brother team of Sharpay and Ryan Evans (Ashley Tisdale and Lucas Grabeel), but also face separation on graduation.
In 2006 the first TV movie was a sort of happy accident. It revelled in the cheesiness of the old movie-musical, where people spontaneously break into song. And it used the high school cafeteria, classroom and gym to great effect. It also represented school in much the same way as HMS Pinafore represents the navy. There are cliques and rivalries at East High, but there's no sex, no drugs, no racial or ethnic tensions, no dropouts and no violence. Everyone is good-looking, well dressed and talented. Classrooms are spacious and clean. It's not high school; it's high school the way we wish it could be.
High School Musical is directed and choreographed by Kenny Ortega, who arranged the dance sequences for 1987's classic Dirty Dancing. This is more like Squeaky-Clean Dancing: a throwback to candyfloss, let's-do-the-show-right-here teendom. Ortega keeps things moving and the kids jumping, but there's nothing here as great as someone trying to put Baby in the corner.
My sunless critic heart also contracts a little at the tunes. The over-souled soundtrack of High School Musical 3 comes crashing through the speakers with such punishing force that it wouldn't be wrong to think Michael Bay might have written the songs himself. Music in this production comes at you like the killer in a horror film, along with lyrics that include deathless, tin-eared rhymes such as "Where's my shaver?/I look like a waiter!"
Yet I don't want to be too snarky about High School Musical 3 because there aren't nearly enough movies aimed at the young that offer cheerfulness, academic achievement and singing in one aspirational package. It's just that there's only so much cuteness a bitter old film reviewer can take close up. If only the endeavour felt more laudable, and less pre-packed at some offshore factory where workers slot in the brainiac mathlete with a surprisingly pretty voice, her faithful boyfriend with new biceps and a sensitive side, neatly choreographed musical numbers and the heartfelt Disney lessons about chaste love and self-expression.
HSM3 wraps up with a broad hint that while Troy and Gaby may have graduated, there's a next generation of musical stars waiting to take over their locker rooms – but if you greet this news with folded arms and a quick look at your watch then you are unlikely to survive until the end credits.
On general release from Friday
