Here’s another sardonic look at the hell of the American high school, where countless American filmmakers believe our souls are locked no matter how long it’s been since we graduated. This horror-comedy expends an unbelievable amount of energy on this overgrazed territory, hurtling along with an airy disregard for narrative coherence.
Director Joseph Kahn, who wrote the script with Mark Palermo, hasn’t so much dressed up the conceit as pepper-sprayed it with every TV show, movie or piece of music he has ever encountered.
The trimmings include a pre-“Hunger Games” Josh Hutcherson, Dane Cook as the cynical principal, a cheerleader (Spencer Locke) whose taste in movies and music is mysteriously frozen in the early ’90s, a jock (Parker Bagley) who’s some sort of tribute to Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly,” grisly sci-fi and horror subplots, more intertitles than “The Artist” and a miserable geek heroine (Shanley Caswell) who’s also a doe-eyed beauty with glorious hair.
“Detention” does have imaginative editing and a stylish, candy-colored look — that is, so long as no one’s vomiting, an activity that takes up an ungodly portion of the running time. Unless you bring something more to the party than your pop-culture obsessions, satirizing high school is about as fresh and engaging as satirizing John Quincy Adams.