Entertainment

‘Fun Size’ is just no fun

‘Fun Size” deals with high schoolers partying on Halloween, but what about it has anything to do with teens? Is it the poop jokes involving the 8-year-old little brother? The references to E.O. Wilson and Aaron Burr and Ruth Bader Ginsburg? My best guess is, it’s the casting of Chelsea Handler, who was born in 1975.

Proving she possesses as little charm on the big screen as on TV, Handler plays the mom of Wren (Victoria Justice), a Cleveland girl who gets stuck baby-sitting her silent, strange little sibling (Jackson Nicoll) so the mom can go party with her hot new 26-year-old boyfriend. I suppose we’re meant to think of Mrs. Robinson, or at least “American Pie,” but the relationship mainly reminded me of the one between Harold and Maude.

Wren and her pals get in cars, drive around, experience mild pranks, back into a chicken restaurant and run afoul of an aging tough guy (an uncredited Johnny Knoxville) who holds the little brother hostage. In the party scene, everybody downs one shot — woot! — and a flirtatious couple wake up next to each other completely clothed. The tweener feel of most of the sitcom-level jokes (the movie carries the Nickelodeon label) is bizarrely mismatched with the ages of the stars: “Fun Size” presents the broiling hormones of youth at room temperature.

The movie has it in mind to produce some of the tender aches of “Sixteen Candles,” but the comedy scenes are so wretched it merely seems odd when, for instance, Handler gives a lengthy speech about the sorrows of being a single mom. Molly Ringwald-like, Wren must choose between two guys: the nerdy Roosevelt (Thomas Mann) and the Porsche-driving Aaron (Thomas McDonell), but both are so dull it’s hard to care. So feeble is the movie that even the wacky, redheaded best friend (Jane Levy) isn’t funny.

As Wren, the brunette Justice has a serene beauty not unlike Minka Kelly’s, but she can’t sell a joke and her dorky comic rap scene (about Wilson, the naturalist) is painful to endure. The one thing she is good at is looking sad, on a visit to her dad’s grave, but I credit the director with that aspect. It must have been easy to create the proper mood by waiting until the cameras rolled and shouting out, “Hey, kid, bad news for your career: We just found out this movie is actually going to be released.”