Teenage assassin Hailee Steinfeld discovers that the treacherous world of espionage has nothing on the perils of high school in Barely Lethal, a bubblegum action comedy that is very much Kick-Ass meets Mean Girls.
Trained from infancy at a top-secret government facility that turns little girls into killing machines, Steinfeld’s junior spy yearns for a normal adolescence. So she fakes her own death in the middle of a mission and, having swotted up on a bunch of teen movies, reinvents herself as Canadian exchange student Megan Walsh. Cue larky fish-out-of-water comedy as the clueless Megan grapples with a crush on the school heartthrob (Toby Sebastian), tries to bond with her snarky teenage host (Dove Cameron) and accidentally blows her cover when her appearance in an embarrassing video goes viral.
It’s lightweight stuff, certainly, but pulled off with breezy, infectious good humour. Samuel L Jackson adds to the fun with some shouty martinet shtick, as do Jessica Alba’s sneering arms dealer and Sophie (Game of Thrones) Turner’s ruthless rival agent. And there are some nifty one-liners, too, from a fleeting, anti-Canadian jibe, ‘Take back Bieber’, to this surreal putdown, ‘You may have them fooled, but you and I both know that you are sketchier than a 2am waffle house’.
Certificate 12A. Runtime 98 mins. Director Kyle Newman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y-CJjJ-jtw
