High School Musical: Not Bad at All

I was fully prepared to cringe my way through. I’m not the target audience for this movie, but as musicals-for-tweens go, it was watchable (geez, damn with faint praise much?). I’ve only seen bits at a time, channel surfing over Disney on my way from Comedy Central to the Cartoon Network. But HSM 3 is out, and South Park did a parody of the series, so I thought it was high time to see the thing.

First, I don’t like to trash directors, but I really think Kenny Ortega fell down on the job. He’s plenty experienced, so there’s no excuse, but I disliked a lot of his choices in this film. Part of it was casting, and possibly out of his hands; few of the young actors were good. They were, of course, hired primarily for their singing and dancing skills, so I understand. But there’s no excuse for sloppy acting on the part of the adults. Only Alyson Reed as Ms. Darbus really nailed the cartoonish teacher thing, and she was excellent. The worst sequence was an exchange between Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens when they discover they’re in the same class. A stilted trading-off of sentence fragments (“I don’t” “Believe it” “Well, me” “Either!”) was the standout lame moment and should have been reworked. Tisdale and Grabeel were decent, but not many others were.

The surprise, for me, was how good Zac Efron is. He’s got great timing, and piles of natural ability. He really was the best thing about HSM, and despite the general level of mediocrity surrounding him, he was believable and charming almost the entire film.

Zac was cute in HSM, but I think I prefer to think of him like this

and also

But I respect you, Zac, and will be watching out for your next dramatic role.