My Review of "Barely Lethal"

Barely Lethal is a cute innocent family movie. I thought it has a lot of fun for what it is and there's a lot to like about it. This movie is definitely not revolutionary but it's a nice diversion if you have the chance to watch it.

This movie is about a girl named Megan. She's an orphan child that has been trained all her life to be a special agent by this man named Hardman. I sort of cringed at her backstory not because this man trained her to be a special agent but he trained a whole slew of orphan girls to become special agents.

You have to start wondering how is he allowed to snatch all of these orphan children to do this? Were they even actual orphans or did he abduct them? It screams nightmares coming from those guerrilla warlords that steal kids from families to be part of their squad of killers. Still, no one bats an eye in the movie that this guy has basically stripped these children of their childhood and forced them into child labor. Ignore all that big factor and this is a whole lot of fun!

So Megan starts to discover that there's another world out there for her that she's not aware of. She wants to be a normal teenager and go to regular high school etc.

As fate would have it, she's put on this mission to capture this big villain named Victoria Knox. During her encounter with Victoria she falls into a lake or something and her team can't find her. Megan realizes that this is the perfect time for her to escape her life as a special agent and decides to let them presume that she had died.

She then finds a family that would host her as a foreign exchange student from Canada. I thought this part was particularly funny. The reaction from the principal when he finds out she's from Canada is hilarious. There are a lot of jokes at her expense as well.

Again there's a lot of plot hole issues that you should really ignore because it won't be fun if you think about them. I mean where did she get all of her money and electronics to do this? She mentions where she got it but it doesn't even makes sense that she was able to because she was under the watchful eye of Hardman.

This movie soon becomes a classic fish out of water movie but in a high school setting. She's totally unaware of all of the social pressures of high school even though she's religiously watched hundreds of movies concerning the social pressures of high school. There's a ton of holes in some of the conversations they have but it's a kids movie what do you expect.

To add a little complexity Megan is trying to build a sister relationship with the host family's daughter Liz. Liz's brother Parker is kind of the comic relief as he keeps finding some of Megan's espionage weapons and plays with them as if they're nothing. Everyone in the family is indifferent with him playing around with a samurai sword. I don't even know why Megan would have a samurai sword. That's some of the comedy that you'll be expecting to see in this movie.

Even worse, while Megan was working for Hardman, unbeknownst to her she had created a rival with Heather. Heather would be the Salieri to Megan's Mozart. Heather is absolutely red faced angry that Megan doesn't even have to work at how good she is as a secret agent while she works her butt off to be half as good as Megan. Throughout her life this has made Heather go nuts.

The characters are charming and endearing. I thought that the whole cast did a fine job in recreating this espionage universe. It did however seem like a low budget movie with sub-par special effects. I think the majority of the money went into the stars in this movie. There are a few stars in this movie, he most noteworthy of the stars is actually Samuel L. Jackson as Hardman. I was really shocked to see that he had a role to play in this movie. I've never known him to play in live action family movies.

Overall, despite my gripes about the movie I did have a good time watching it. I think it is what it is and they did a good job with what they had. Families will have fun with this movie and that's not a bad thing. I have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. You can watch this through without getting bored. It's fun and self aware.