The Prank: Moreno earns her teacher’s salary in otherwise weak horror-comedy

Cinema | March 19th, 2024

By Greg Carlson

The chief reason to see “The Prank,” a lumpy and unappetizing stew that could use a lot more salt, is legend Rita Moreno. The now 92-year-old phenomenon and EGOT winner (who was also the first Latin American woman to collect an acting Oscar) continues to perform like an unstoppable force. As the last working star who appeared in “Singin’ in the Rain,” Moreno links the present to Hollywood’s shimmering past. In 2021, she was the subject of Mariem Perez Riera’s worthwhile documentary feature, subtitled “Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It.” That career retrospective, which acknowledged the often cruel realities Moreno overcame to reach the summit, implicitly argues that the icon deserves to have her pick of projects.

Unfortunately, director Maureen Bharoocha’s movie, limping into theaters after languishing on the shelf since its 2022 premiere at SXSW, will be but a Moreno footnote. In the slight horror-comedy, Moreno plays high school physics teacher Mrs. Wheeler, a sharp-tongued disciplinarian known for her stylish bob, sleek black wardrobe (including ever-present kid gloves) and withering stare. Despite working well past the common retirement age, Wheeler strikes fear into the hearts of students like Ben Palmer (Connor Kalopsis), who is sweating it out over his need to secure a college scholarship. Following a cheating accusation, Ben and his bestie Mei Tanner (Ramona Young) cook up a flimsy plan to accuse Wheeler of murder.

The screenplay by the married writing team of Rebecca Flinn-White and Zak White deserves the largest share of the blame for the movie’s failing report card. Plotted with no concern for even the most rudimentary internal logic, the narrative stumbles and lurches from one incomprehensible sequence to another, ignoring both the rules of coherent storytelling and whatever legal policies and procedures we might expect to be followed by the investigating authorities. Even when the boy-who-cried-wolf “twist” veers into the absurd territory of severed heads in jars, Moreno gamely sticks it out.

The well-established trope of the awful teacher pops up in all kinds of cinematic contexts and genres: Imelda Staunton’s Dolores Umbridge, William Atherton’s Jerry Hathaway and Cameron Diaz’s Elizabeth Halsey are just three disasters who should be kept far away from pupils of any level. Some viewers might remember Helen Mirren’s Eve Tingle, the vindictive history teacher in “Teaching Mrs. Tingle.” And movie and television nerds of a certain age will conjure happier memories of Christopher Lloyd as the nightmarish English instructor B. O. Beanes in the 1986 “Amazing Stories” episode “Go to the Head of the Class.”

“Golden Arm” (Bharoocha’s previous feature directorial outing), was superior to “The Prank” in every category. The ridiculous competitive arm-wrestling comedy, which I argued deserved more attention for the way it grounded its cartoonish subculture in real pathos, consistently piled up laughs that are notably absent from most of “The Prank.” As a rated-R addition to the teen movie pantheon, “The Prank” is also shockingly light on youthful hijinks. Despite the homicidal happenings, few of the supporting characters — including Meredith Salenger as Ben’s mother and Keith David as the principal — express much alarm, even when things start getting strange. Class dismissed.

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