Coiffed with what must
have been a budget-busting supply of styling gel, the cast of High School
Musical 3: Senior Year looks not just freshly scrubbed, but manicured, exfoliated,
and dipped in a vat of hot wax. Before deodorants, colognes, and perfumes are
added, their natural odor is probably "new car smell." And that's the Disney
Channel look: post-ethnic, post-racial, upper-middle-class suburban kids from
some blissful Utah utopia, the sort of place where every household has a plate
of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies sitting on the kitchen counter. That
artifice is transparent and impersonal—at all times, reminding viewers
that they're watching "product"—but it actually serves the High School
Musical
series well, because musicals accommodate slick unreality. If nothing else, HSM
3 has the
bubbly brio to carry its hermetic emotions across.
It's senior year at East
High in Albuquerque, and the HSM gang face the expected uncertainty about their
futures while planning to put on one last big show. Lovebirds Zac Efron and
Vanessa Hudgens are committed to each other, if their adult-contemporary-style
duets are any indication, but they're headed for radically different college
tracks. Hudgens gets an offer from Stanford; Efron is torn between playing
basketball for a local college with his best friend (Corbin Bleu) or pursuing
theater at Julliard, with both options putting him many miles away from his
beloved. (Spoiler alert: There may be an unheralded Option C.) Meanwhile, other
gifted seniors vie for roles in a year-ending, show-stopping musical, so that
they, too, may earn a slot at the Fame school of their choice.
HSM 3 works much better in the
uptempo numbers than the ballads, which have the generic "This Is My Now"
quality of inspirational American Idol singles. Numbers like "The Boys Are Back,"
an 'N Sync sound-alike performed by Efron and Bleu in the world's spiffiest
scrap yard, are energetic and fun, and they play to Kenny Ortega's flair for
aggressive yet playful choreography. Efron is the epitome of sexless Disney
heartthrobs, but he's an electrifying song-and-dance man, so much so that his
castmates (Bleu excepted) look like they have concrete shoes by comparison. The
franchise will likely go on without him, but judging by how badly the film
flounders when he isn't onscreen, it won't be the same.