Helicopter Mom (2015)

I usually hate to just write-off a film, but this really doesn’t have much going for it at all. Indeed, just how “Lloyd” (Jason Dolley) made it to his seventeenth birthday without killing himself or his ferociously irritating mother “Maggie” (Nia Vardalos) is quite a puzzle in itself. For some reason she has concluded that he is gay. He hasn’t a clue, one way or the other, but goes with the flow for the moment as she manages to get him a scholarship to study in New York and that, frankly, is all he cares about if it gets him away from her for a while. Meantime, his far less interfering and divorced father “Max” (Mark Boone Junior) takes a far more hands-off approach to his son’s sexuality accepting that it will emerge at it’s own pace as he sees fit, and that he will be there regardless. The wheels really do come off mum’s cunning plan when “Lloyd” asks “Carrie” (Skyler Samuels) to the proms. She’s a “Carrie” not he’s a “Cary” and so “Maggie” feels the need to kibosh that in case his funding goes the way of the dodo - and that is bound to lead to a showdown of ridiculous proportions amidst their school friends and their own equally vacuous mothers. There are a few moments, usually father to son, when this takes a slightly more adult approach to defining, or not, the sexuality of “Lloyd”, but for the rest of this it struggles to engage on just about every level and the attempts at humour from Vardalos stray far too often into the annoying, the contrived and the downright unfunny. Dolley fares little better, though to be fair he has little of substance to work with that doesn’t make us all cringe, and after an eighty minutes that felt like double that time I felt exhausted by the sheer crassness of the whole thing. Sorry, but this film is one to avoid I’m afraid.