by Lisa Hemsley

Created on: June 14, 2010   Last Updated: June 15, 2010

Mike O’Donnell is having a hard time. He is going through a divorce, he struggles to communicate with his children and he did not get the promotion he wanted at work. He thinks this is all down to a bad decision he made when he was 17. It was just before the start of a basketball game that his girlfriend Scarlett told him she was pregnant and he decided to stand by her and get married, but at the cost of the game that had a talent scout there to watch him and offer him a college scholarship.

As a result of this decision, Mike thinks his life is awful and wishes he could relive it. He meets a janitor at this old high school and soon he finds himself being 17 again. With the help of his best friend Ned, he gets enrolled back at his old school and soon finds he loves being back there and being close to his children.

Will Mike be able to learn that his life is not all bad and appreciate what he had and will he ever get back to his normal age or will he be staring over from 17 again?

I had mixed feelings about this film. I wanted to see it as I like Matthew Perry as an actor, but I was put off by Zac Efron as he seemed to only play the same role which was aimed more towards the children. I did decide to give it a go and went into it very open mined. When the film started I got the impression that this was going to be very similar to the film Mr Destiny as the storyline was very similar but soon I was also getting the impression that this was a backwards version of the film Big. The storyline was very good, but I did find it was quite predictable.

I liked Matthew Perry in the role of old Mike and thought he did a good job. I liked how he bought some humour to his character and loved how he took bad news and his relationship with best friend Ned. Young 17 year old Mike was played by Zac Efron and I have to say I was quite surprised by him. He seemed to bring a lot to the role but I did see a lot of similarities to his previous role in High School Musical. I think that he could have moved away from this old role if the basketball theme in the film was changed to perhaps football o some other sport. He did show his dancing ability again in this film but for me it was too like other films.

There were a lot of supporting actors in the film and I liked each and every one of them. The role of Ned was a good character and I loved how he was comic book and magical character crazy. Hubby did say that he would have loved some of the toys which Ned had in his house. He

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