Review: Sky High

Remember freshman year of high school? Remember how insecure you felt going into this strange place where everyone knew more than you? Imagine how hard high school would have been, if, before you even got there, everyone expected you to be brilliant in math and science, because your parents are Nobel-prize-winnging astrophysicists - and you sucked at math and science. Give everyone superpowers, and that's basically the premise of Sky High.

Will Stronghold (Michael Angarano) is about to enter Sky High, a high school where future superheroes are trained. Will's parents, Steve Stronghold/The Commander (Kurt Russell) and Josie Stronghold/Jetstream (Kelly Preston), are the most famous superheroes in the entire world. In the world of Sky High, superheroes are common and accepted - Will sees news reports of his parents saving the world from evil robots and other assorted bad guys.

In their day jobs, the Strongholds are the super-successful owners of the Stronghold Real Estate Agency. Will's dad has super-strength. His mom can fly.  Everyone knows Will's parents, and everyone expects Will to follow in their sizeable footsteps and join his parents in saving the world, but Will - Will has no power at all, yet. No superstrength, no flying, nothing. On the bus, he learns that all his friends have gotten their powers; these kids talk about getting their powers, much like prepubescent girls discuss getting that all important first period. The first day of school, the incoming freshmen get sorted into two groups, Heroes and Sidekicks.

Will cannot demonstrate a power, so he gets relegated to the Sidekicks. Will is ashamed to tell his parents he has no powers and is on the Sidekick track, so for a while he keeps up the ruse that all is well. His Dad is so excited that Will is entering super hero training,  he gives Will access to the Secret Sanctum  - with the admonition, of course, to never, EVER let anyone else down there. And of course, you just know Will is gonna break that rule, don't you? Sure, it's a little predictable, but it's still fun. 

Will gets to be good friends with the other Sidekicks - Ethan (Dee Jay Daniels), who can melt into a puddle; Magenta (Kelly Vitz), who can shape-shift - into a guinea pig; and Zach (Nicholas Braun), who can...glow - sort of. Hippie-chick Layla (Danielle Panabaker), Will's best friend since first grade, is also a Sidekick, even though she can control nature - which is a cool superpower - because she refused to demonstrate her power for Coach Boomer (aka Sonic Boom). Why? Because she doesn't believe in the seperatism of Heroes and Sidekicks, and refuses to participate in the defining of artificial power structures. Right on, hippie-chick.

Will eventually does tells his parents about his power-less state. Dad, especially, is devastated - he even thinks, for a moment, about throwing Will into a vault of radioactive waste, so he'll develop a super power. Fortunately for Will - and his dad - he suddenly develops super-strength one day while defending himself against Warren Peace (his mother was a hero, his dad was a villian), his archenemy at the school, who hates Will because The Commander put Warren's dad in prison. Suddenly, Will finds himself one of the popular kids, and sexy Gwen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the student body president - and a senior - is all over him. Before you can say "Wonder Twin powers, activate!", Will has been moved to the Hero section and abandoned his friends.

This film has plenty of clever moments, like when Layla comes over the first day of school and Josie offers her bacon and eggs. She fires back that a friend of hers has the power of being able to talk to animals, and, you know what? It turns out they don't like being eaten so much. There's an interesting side story involving the surly Warren Peace (channeling Judd Nelson's Bender from The Breakfast Club) and how he becomes part of the team, in spite of himself. There's a whole bit with Mr. Boy (Dave Foley), one of the Sidekick teachers, which is pretty funny as well. Mr. Boy used to be The Commander's sidekick, er, Hero Support, before The Commander hooked up with the much sexier Jetstream.

Stylistically, this is a very typical Disney "hero" movie, and not just in the superpower sense. Disney is pretty well-known in screenwriting circles for being very strict about story structure. In a Disney hero film, the hero has to have a problem, solve the problem, take a wrong turn, realize he's screwed up, then find redemption and save the day. A hero can never, ever, find success by lying to himself or others or by being dishonest, he has to face his flaws and overcome them, and then he can have success. Sky High follows that arc almost to the letter, but it does so in an engaging and entertaining way.

Panabaker is great as the earnest, intelligent Layla, (and she's luminescently lovely to boot); it's pretty much axiomatic that she, as the female best friend of our hero, will have a crush on Will and that Will won't notice it, and also axiomatic that Will will develop a huge crush on the Popular, Unattainable Girl - in this case, Gwen, the gorgeous student body president.  Gwen is a technopath - she can control technology with her mind, but the film breaks with traditional teen-movie tradition here and has Gwen avidly pursuing younger Will.

This should be your first clue that Something Suspicous is up, because everyone know that in the world of high school movies, older, pretty, popular girls never go after younger guys without some kind of ulterior motive. Just what that motive is, and how Will fulfills his hero arc, you'll have to see the film to find out.

For the most part, I enjoyed Sky High. It kept me engaged enough to pass 90 minutes without feeling the need to glance at my cell phone to check the time, the story was fun and campy, and the acting didn't completely suck. The kids and adults in the audience were responsive to the film, laughing at all the funny bits. The special effects were fun too, and it was interesting to watch the film and think, man, if only I would have had the power to freeze people when I was in high school, I would've had me some fun!

The acting by the kids in this film was a cut above a lot of kids in films I've seen lately - maybe because they're mostly teenagers and many of them have at least some other acting experience. Angarano, who has a pretty substantial resume for an 18-year-old, is eminently likeable, aptly evoking that heady mix of fear, confusion and emotion that permeates the teen years. Russell, though, really brings this film up above the level of the average boring kid-flick. He's a great actor, and he has so much fun with the role of The Commander and wearing that hero suit, it's infectious to watch him. Preston has fun with the her role, too.

Lynda Carter, aka Wonder Woman, has a turn in the film as Principal Powers, the sexy principal of Sky High. Interesting trivia tidbit: according to IMDB, her character was originally going to wear gold bracelets as an homage to her Wonder Woman character, but Warner Bros., who own the copyright to Wonder Woman, didn't want the bracelets in a Disney film.

The script was penned by newcomer Paul Hernandez, with an assist by Disney writing vets Robert Schooley and Mark McCorkle (both credited for some Kim Possible stuff, as well as the screenplays for Aladdin and the King of Thieves and The Return of Jafar). Rumor has it that Sky High is going to be made into a series for the Disney channel, and possibly a sequel as well. With characters this likeable and a premise that's intriguing to kids - what kid doesn't dream of having super powers? - I'd expect a Sky High series, if done well, to be quite popular with the kiddie set. My kids, I have no doubt, would be big fans.