There’s a well-tested, and mostly well-liked, formula being recycled in Amazon’s lightweight Fourth of July comedy Space Cadet. It’s the mildly rousing story of an underestimated blonde excelling in a more serious field, something Goldie Hawn aced in Private Benjamin and Protocol before Melanie Griffith took over with Working Girl and Born Yesterday, followed by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde (the less said about Jessica Simpson’s two under-the-radar attempts, the better). It’s an easy, against-all-odds rise for us to get behind and a career-defining every-scene showcase for an actor who may have also found herself unfairly undervalued by the industry.
There’s something for both actor and character to prove, and when it’s done right, we should be able to taste the same hunger, cheering for an inevitable victory. But in the writer-director Liz W Garcia’s blandly cobbled together attempt, one will have trouble tasting much of anything. It’s another cheap and poorly made category-filler, the kind that makes you want to reconsider how many streaming subscriptions you’re paying for, a grim, plasticky reminder of what so many films look and feel like now.
The Netflix-led rise of romantic and female-led comedies has been a superficial win, given how they’d been largely absent from the big screen in recent years, a large audience barely catered to. But too many of them have been made without much care, lazily thrown together unlike the glossier films that they’re modeled on. Space Cadet is as garishly lit and shoddily green-screened as the worst of them, which is distractingly bad enough in itself but something that could perhaps be tempered by other elements. The current Netflix hit A Family Affair, with Nicole Kidman romancing Zac Efron, looks far uglier than it should, but there’s enough charm from the performers and the script to make it just about work. Here the visuals are as rough as everything else, saving graces nowhere to be found.
The star Emma Roberts has been somewhere similar before, in 2007’s Wild Child, in which an English boarding school tamed her Californian excess. Here the journey to self-discovery takes her, as the improbably nicknamed Rex, from Florida, where she has turned bartending into a lifestyle, drinking and partying hard with her best friend, Nadine (Hacks’ Poppy Liu), to Nasa, where she hopes to live out her dream of going to space. Rex had been accepted to Georgia Tech years ago but dropped out when her mother got sick. After Nadine spruces up her application to become an astronaut with some embellishments, she finds herself in her element but out of her depth.
The film exists in the kind of frothy far-away fantasy land where audience questions are not only discouraged but ridiculed. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously, defenders would say – fine – but even in such heightened territory, there has to be some sense of structure and Garcia’s script just isn’t smart or slick enough to have us suspend disbelief entirely. No one would check to see if she had really won a Pulitzer? References would be obtained long after she was hired? A one-time Georgia Tech applicant would attend her first day in skimpy party gear? The problem is that Rex’s ascent is not only absurd but crucially uninvolving – we simply don’t care if she makes it to space or not – and Roberts, comfortable and competent in this territory if not entirely convincing, is unable to lift her character out of network sitcom cliche.
The uplift of a woman triumphing in a male-dominated Stem world isn’t enough to get us through a mess of grindingly unfunny dialogue, too-broad performances and an utter, movie-killing lack of charm. Films like Space Cadet should feel graceful and light, going down easy like the many sweet cocktails we see Rex prepare, but this one is hopelessly muddled, a bitter first sip that proceeds to curdle.