Four high school freshmen storm into their first-ever party in teen sex comedy Incoming. Keep your expectations low and they’ll be comfortably met, Daniel Rutledge writes.
Incoming (2024)
The teen sex comedy is a reliable old dog of a genre. It’s a bit like B-grade action—you always know roughly what you’re going to get, you know the bad ones are usually still entertaining on a very basic level and you know the great ones aren’t ever all that great. Incoming is an average entry into this average genre. It serves as good enough to giggle along to for an hour and a half, only to be mostly forgotten soon thereafter, and that’s about it.
Like Good Boys, this has age-appropriate actors in the roles of the protagonists, which is a nice improvement on a lot of older movies of this sort which often had 30-somethings posing as teens. The young cast go admirably hard, too, with Mason Thames and Isabella Ferreira charismatic standouts. But for some viewers, having such youthful actors indulging in such R-rated fare may be a bit uncomfortable. And Incoming does push the boat out with stuff like ketamine use as well as the usual booze and weed, and a long, full-on faeces bit that would be truly sickening if the fake faeces looked a bit more like real faeces. It’s still pretty gross though.
While it does get full-on in some ways, it’s notable that there is next to no nudity or actual sex, making this quite different from the teen sex comedies of old—that and the racially diverse cast. But the story and the characters are very firmly of that comfortably familiar old mould, with the usual hedonistic house party taking up the bulk of the running time.
What would’ve elevated this a lot is better scripting. The story is fine, the characters are fine, the big gags are all fine—but the dialogue that ties it all together is not funny enough, often enough to make this feel like more of a win. Sure, it also could’ve been better by being more inventive, but really, this sort of thing doesn’t need to. If the constant teen chatter was more consistently hilarious that would’ve shone a very favourable light over everything else.
Another way Incoming differs from the older movies it is inspired by is by how refreshingly wholesome the male characters mostly are. They’re sex-obsessed and talk about a “dong-to-puss ratio” at the party and other silly teen boy stuff, but they are true gentlemen compared to the predators of films like Revenge of the Nerds. The worst of them is actually Bobby Cannavale’s character, an unbelievably pathetic teacher suffering a midlife crisis so bad that he attends the party and gets wasted with his students. Yeesh.
The film’s customary moral resolution doesn’t come off as too preachy, going for a “be authentic” message that is only a little ham-fisted. It’s also interesting in what it suggests happens after the movie, rather than in it, with an ending that could feel anticlimactic but is actually pretty cool. I had low expectations, sure, but they were more than comfortably met with this mildly enjoyable flick.
