“You are more concept than reality, Clapton Davis.”

The motley crew.

Detention is just this side of brilliant. It would probably be surpassing brilliant if it weren’t a movie that only people aged 20-30 could ever possibly understand let alone enjoy. I mean, this shit is going to lose people in the kinetic and awesome credits sequence alone. Most of the people in that bracket aren’t pop-culture aware/sensitive/whatever to really follow all the quips, criticisms, gags, and references. They’re going to think Detention is overly clever by way of ADHD and since that’s pretty much how Joseph Kahn (director of Torque and those paintball episodes of Community) intended it, I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb to say that Detention is a film that requires a certain type of taste. It’s not very accessible, if you haven’t figured that out by now, unless you’re a 20-30 year old person who is at least interested in trends and culture, specifically framed by youth from 1992 to 2012. You kind of have to have lived through the period and retained the right mix of loathing and nostalgia for it. I dunno if it’s possible to hold not liking this against anyone as I’m not sure this kind of taste is something people should even have. It definitely make Detention work if you, like me, (un)fortunately have it, though.

Not that Detention is a sentimentally nostalgic movie. There is definitely a lot of affection for the 80′s (John Hughes style), 90′s (90% of the rest) and the aughts (this movie gets contemporary teens), but most of it is hilariously specific (like Mmmbop by Hanson, which gets its own credit). In general, though, the movie is making fun of sentimentality especially where it concerns what we take away from high school, how we frame it while it’s happening, and the kind of people it molds us into even if our back stories are way beyond the stereotypical.