Status Update is a 2018 comedy about a teenager who after being uprooted by his parents’ separation and unable to fit into his new hometown, stumbles upon a magical app that causes his social media updates to come true.
We move with the times and as such, fantasies in movies move with them, evolving as the technology allows. In the the 80s it was magical trinkets and in the 90s it was computers and now its smartphones. That’s why it almost feels completely organic for Scott Speer‘s latest comedy Status Update to use apps as a source for dreams to come true and in truth, as a lightweight by-the-numbers teen angsty genie in a bottle comedy, it does what it intends, offering a few sturdy laughs but absolutely nothing more.
Kyle Moore (Ross Lynch) is not having a good day. Having moved from sunny California to suburban Connecticut because his parents have separated, he is the square peg, and his three thousand miles from the right hole. A tanned blond surfer dude, he doesn’t exactly fit in and is immediately targeted by the school jocks, led by cocky hockey star Derek (Gregg Sulkin), who sets about making Kyle’s like miserable. He starts that quest by slapshotting his smartphone down the hall, leaving it in pieces. Heading to the mall, Kyle stops at a phone kiosk and meets an eccentric salesperson (Josh Ostrovsky) who sells him a new kind of phone featuring an app called ‘Universe’ which turns any status update into reality. Armed with that, well, the tables are suddenly turned.
Speer, working off a script by Jason Filardi, isn’t going for subtlety, the jokes raw and rapid fire built off plenty of old standards we’ve seen before, turning them up to the proverbial eleven. ‘Universe’ grants Moore with anything he wants, instantly doing and giving him anything he desires, which of course doesn’t always make things work as he hoped, having to figure out how to use it properly to give him the real edge. Naturally, Kyle wants to be popular and get the new girl of his dreams, Dani (Olivia Holt). Along the way, Kyle is surrounded by a world of clichés, with every person he meets torn from the molds of every last stereotype in the teen movie genre, though there are a few twists, including a second bully who tries to lower the boom, though like Derek feels barely burdened by any authentic motivation.
So if you’re thinking this sounds a lot like a teen version of Adam Sandler‘s Click, you wouldn’t be far off. Only this is more absurd, if that’s possible. Working with magic allows things like a full scale cafeteria song and dance routine to spontaneously breakout on one end of the prism while mom and dad work things out on the other. This lets Kyle blow up on social media and become the most popular kid in school, which of course presents all kinds of new hurdles.
The comedy isn’t fresh as all, naturally, nor is it trying to be, this is simply a rehash of a rehash with a fresh coat of modern applied liberally to all corners. There are some fun moments, and if you’re in the mood for some silly laughs and a new take on a very, very old formula, then this might make for a decent distraction. Otherwise, this is lowball stuff with not much ambition, mostly being a TV-quality vehicle to play out the tropes in the field and add it to the stack of so many others like it.