“Barely Lethal”

In her breakthrough performance as Mattie Ross in the Coen Brothers’ 2010 adaptation of True Grit, Hailee Steinfeld wowed audiences with a steely reserve far beyond her then-13 years of age. For maintaining her character’s composure in a frontier crawling with menace while tapping into an unforeseen inner strength, Steinfeld earned an Academy Award nomination. She didn’t take the statuette home, but no matter: American screen acting had its next child prodigy, a preternaturally talented actress with a good head on her shoulders and distinctive big-screen looks. Perhaps the head was planted too firmly on there. Steinfeld took a three-year hiatus after her True Grit turn, and though she’s delivered some promising work as of late—her screen time in Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman last year was brief but respectable—she hasn’t been able to follow through on the promise of her star-making appearance.

Kyle Newman’s high-school action-comedy Barely Lethal will not be the film that brings Steinfeld the recognition patiently awaiting her. As allegedly remorseless teen assassin Megan Walsh, she displays no traces of the resolve and terse gumption that made her such an exciting find five years ago. Instead, John D’Arco’s screenplay calls for its no-mercy trained killer to act in the wacky, socially inept mold of many a date-night teen-flick protagonist. To Steinfeld’s credit, she turns out to be pretty good at playing that role, too—but the hit-or-miss film surrounding her certainly doesn’t help her cause.

Barely Lethal’s overarching problem, the bug that makes the film’s considerable reserves of fun difficult to completely enjoy, is a matter of pure logistics. Megan was raised by a shadowy paramilitary agency called the Prescott School to be a killing machine for the government, disposing of international terror threats while her contemporaries were learning not to eat undercooked Easy-Bake dough the hard way. Normal girls were tortured by crushes; Megan crushed her torturers. Newman goes to great lengths to play up the inhuman rigor with which Megan and her fellow agents were tempered; dismantling the girls’ emotions makes them more effective killers.

But like Ariel the mermaid longingly caressing her dinglehopper, Megan leafs through a secret copy of Tiger Beat and fantasizes about a world where the most pressing danger is unexpectedly getting her period in pre-calculus. When a botched mission to capture arms dealer Victoria Knox (Jessica Alba, fooling nobody) leaves Megan M.I.A., she seizes the opportunity to disappear into the suburban sprawl. Posing as an exchange student from Regina, Saskatchewan—which rhymes with “vagina” and provides her peers with plenty of artillery for mean jokes—Megan goes deep undercover in her most treacherous mission yet: being the new girl at school. Tagging along with her exchange sister Liz (Dove Cameron), Megan must acclimate to the alien hallways and classrooms while evading Knox’s murder attempts and the Prescott School’s reclamation efforts.

A great spy usually has the ability to blend into any surroundings, yet Megan constantly draws attention to herself. Having watched Mean Girls as recon before entering frenemy territory, Megan deftly identifies catty girls at school as setting her up for humiliation. This agent’s acumen then disappears a scene later, when Megan readily accepts that a gig as the school’s mascot will win over the heart of the resident bad boy, Cash, who moonlights as the front man for a local band named (believe it or not) “EMOTICON.” More frustrating still, the ostensibly unshakable Megan responds to innocuous questions with a string of highly specified weapons jargon on numerous occasions. For a supposedly elite spy, Megan, based on her misadventures here, appears to be pretty terrible at it, and Steinfeld can only do so much to sell such an illogical characterization.

If you can put aside such inconsistencies, though, Barely Lethal does have its pleasures. Approximately every third joke lands right in the kill zone, from a Rob Huebel-played dad who warns his son about the potency of hash, to an exchange between Megan and Liz that conflates taking a man’s life with losing your V-card (to hilariously specific ends: Megan almost stabbed a guy once, but admits that “I think it only counts if it goes all the way in”). Even as Newman ticks all requisite high-school comedy boxes—a kegger gone awry, the third-act realization that the right boy for Megan was standing right in front of her the whole time—he generally finds fresh and humorous angles to the clichés. There are minor annoyances, such as heinously poor green-screen effects, a discomfiting running joke involving Dan Fogler as a vaguely pedophiliac science teacher, and a trying-on-clothes montage scored to a watered-down cover of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation.” Major ones, including a bafflingly underutilized Samuel L. Jackson as Megan’s handler and Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner as Megan’s rival, hint at a bloodbath in the editing room. But the film’s charms, of which Steinfeld provides the lion’s share, minimize the collateral damage. Mission: accomplished, sort of.