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Disney stars make for a nostalgia-inducing 'Senior Year'

Written by Alexa Garcia-Ditta

Thursday, 04 December 2008 12:10 AM

High School Musical 3:
Senior Year
Starring: Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel, Corbin Bleu, Monique Coleman
Director: Kenny Ortega
Three out of five stars

For most of us, high school is a closed curtain. We’ve hung the pom-poms, tucked away the basketball trophies or forgotten the last songs performed on the drama club’s stage.

But for Zac Efron’s Troy Bolton and his East High posse, the college decisions and career paths are new. The boyishly handsome Bolton, Vanessa Hudgen’s innocent Gabriella Montez, Ashley Tisdale’s perfectly selfish Sharpay Evans and their friends move from television features to the movie screen in High School Musical 3: Senior Year, delivering a musically upbeat portrayal of their last time sharing the stage. Their innocence and simplicity are hard to ignore, and the entire performance sends older viewers down memory lane.

The movie starts with a very close shot of Efron’s face, dripping with sweat and watching the scoreboard count down during his last basketball game as an East High Wildcat. The film follows the gang’s senior year, during which they set out to perform a musical called, conveniently, Senior Year.

The film wouldn’t be complete without the typical HSM drama. Evans and her twin brother Ryan Evans, played by Lucas Grabeel, are out to steal the spotlight from Montez and Bolton, who grapple with the long-distance relationship troubles familiar to so many of us.
Bolton and his best friend and basketball court companion Chad Danworth, played by Corbin Bleu, have their futures set with basketball scholarships to the University of Albuquerque. But Bolton may have a different plan for himself.

Though most of HSM 3 revolves around Bolton, the girls are who to watch. Hudgens, clad in flowery dresses and pristine hair accessories, sometimes overshadows her on- and off-screen boyfriend Efron during love songs like “Right Here, Right Now” and “Can I Have This Dance?” But the eyelash-batting and innocent pecks on the cheek are unfortunately as much as you’ll get from the lovers. Remember, this is G-rated, my college friends.

Tisdale, the already acclaimed pop starlet, should play evil for the rest of her career. She’s got the mean-girl walk, talk and snide comments down to an art. She and her on-screen twin Grabeel rock out to “I Want It All” during the first half of the movie.
Most of the songs were catchy, but the film could’ve done without one scenario-turned-flashy performance — Efron and Bleu’s “The Boys are Back.” The two perform their song in a junkyard, where they jump around their beat up truck and heaps of tires. Maybe the directors were going for a scene resembling Grease’s classic “Greased Lightning,” but it didn’t really work. And the bandanas have to go.

As Efron and friends enter their 20s this year, and Bolton and the rest of the Wildcats graduate from East High, their replacements make their debuts in HSM 3. Efron, Tisdale and Bleu have obvious younger counterparts who will most likely take the reigns, but Hudgens’ is still to be decided.

It’s a good thing that Efron, Hudgens, Tisdale and the rest chose to bow out after this movie. They ended their senior year with a nostalgia-provoking bang, and though they have unmistakable talent, we don’t need a College Musical.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 20 January 2009 05:31 PM )

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