A fun but mostly unmemorable comedy
For a movie released in 2024, you might wonder why some of its more prominent cast members look so young. Joey King (Bullet Train), Nolan Gould (Modern Family), and Brendan Meyer (The OC) are just a few of the actors that you might think have been de-aged by some kind of digital trickery.
Well, the answer behind their youthfulness is a simple one: Camp was made in 2016 but was held back from release until now for reasons that currently aren’t known to me.
It’s because of this delayed release that you might assume the movie is a bad one. After all, this has certainly been the case for a lot of terrible movies, including Accidental Love, a Jake Gyllenhaal ‘comedy’ that started filming in 2008 but didn’t get a release until 2015 when it was met with a muted (and bewildered) response from audiences and critics who pretty much hated it.
Thankfully, Camp isn’t on a level with that one, so your fears can be allayed. That isn’t to say Camp is a particularly good movie but it passes the time well enough, with an engaging cast of young actors who elevate the thin material with their energetic performances.
The movie is centred around a group of teens who arrive at Camp Pearlstein for what they hope will be a fun and frolicsome summer. Their hopes don’t quite align with the people in charge of the camp, a pair of rabbis called Jason and Randy whose main goal is to teach the young people a few moral lessons. Quite what morality has to do with the rabbis pretending to be Nazi ghosts is anybody’s guess – I’m still baffled by this bizarre (and potentially offensive) plot point – but perhaps they were trying to teach a lesson that I didn’t quite understand.
Of the ensemble cast, a few actors get more to do than others. These include Brendan Meyer as Jake, a young lad who spends almost the entire movie trying to get the attention of a girl named Maya (Mychala Lee), who he has a crush on. His attempts are foiled by a sleazebag named Ezra (Ian Nelson), who thinks he’s the top dog at the camp, and whose only goal is to get off with as many girls as he can during the summer.
This love/lust triangle is one of the movie’s main plot threads but there’s a subplot about another relationship between two other teens, Howard (Teo Halm) and Angela (Annalise Basso), the geeks of the bunch who bond over their love of books and sci-fi. The scenes of the two of them together are quite sweet and in sharp contrast to some of the other scenes in the movie that are occasionally quite raunchy.
As mentioned, Joey King is in this movie but she doesn’t get a lot of screen time. This is quite surprising as at the time this movie was made, she was a well-known face in Hollywood, having starred in such movies as The Conjuring and Wish I Was Here. I expected her to be one of the movie’s main players, especially as she features prominently on the poster, but instead, her character spends more time rolling her eyes at the behaviour of her fellow campers than actually joining in with their antics.
Camp is a comedy, not that you’d know it, as it’s rarely very funny. There’s an amusing scene when Jake is caught masturbating and then given a lecture by the rabbis on the power of the Jewish penis. In that same scene, there’s also an anecdote from one of the rabbis about their childhood lust for Alice, the housekeeper from The Brady Bunch. He comically tells Jake about his sexual confusion when he discovered the actress who played her was a lesbian!
But outside of this sequence, there aren’t many laugh-out-loud moments. As the movie is rarely dull, this doesn’t really matter, though I wish the script had been sharper and wittier. Regardless, the young actors deliver their lines well enough, the direction from Josh Yunis (Advanced Chemistry) is competent, and beneath the silliness are a few decent points to be made about the importance of standing up for yourself and others.
There’s nothing particularly memorable about Camp – it won’t erase the memories you may have of similar movies, such as Ivan Reitman’s 1979 comedy Meatballs, which is a classic of the genre. But you might still find it enjoyable, especially if you can relate to any of the characters in this movie because of your own teenage experiences of summer camp.
Read More: Camp Ending Explained
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Verdict - 6/10
6/10