Candy JAR Review is a 2018 comedy about dueling high school debate champs who are at odds on just about everything who forge ahead with ambitious plans to get into the colleges of their dreams.
High School has long been the playground for competition in movies, from sports to romance to student counsel and more. Movies for decades have pitted the brightest and worst against each other with all kinds of simple lessons to pick up along the way. With Ben Shelton‘s latest for Netflix, it’s back to basics in a fast-talking easy to predict film that is loaded with all the standards, even as its cast works hard to make it more.
Lona Skinner (Sami Gayle) and Bennett Russell (Jacob Latimore) are long time enemies, go-getting, power-hungry high schoolers with big ambitions who are on opposite ends of the tracks. She’s lower middle-class with a struggling single mother Amy (Christina Hendricks) hoping to get to Harvard, and he’s the son of a wealthy single mom senator Julia (Uzo Aduba) – with Barack Obama a family friend – who has eyes on Yale. Currently, they are both on the debate team, of which they are at the moment, the only members, and both feel they should be the president of the club. At each other’s throats at all minutes of the day, there’s obviously something more simmering underneath, and when they must work together to get what they want, it’s a cooperative battle that changes everything.
The best parts of Candy Jar are the relationships between students and their mothers, the film casting a kind John Hughes vibe as the mothers are old high school competitors themselves, with Amy embarrassed at her low income and resentful of Julia’s success. As they both work in their own ways to keep their children motivated, both a little oblivious to what Lona and Bennett do to be committed to their passions, things all slip into the ruts of the genre, where all that competitiveness shifts to their true feelings.
It’s all rather saccharin with little to keep it edgy, the film much more interested in staying on its rails, introducing another school team (Antonia Gentry and Ariana Guerra) who completely abandon the accepted rules of the debate format that seem unimportant initially but well, you can bet isn’t later. Further helping both Lona and Bennett is their guidance counselor Kathy (Helen Hunt) – she the keeper of the titular candy jar – who is the voice that takes time to get heard. She’s the kind of adult that only exists in movies like this, but nonetheless feels the most authentic.
There’s really nothing wrong with Candy Jar, filling the small void between this and another high school story and will probably appeal to plenty that the film is aiming to entertain. It’s full of charming performances and is kept ticking along with a plucky score, making it safe for a night with at the movies with the whole family. It’s just never challenging, skimming superficially over the issues it introduces, leaving this a see-through experience with not much impact. That’s most likely all it wants to be.