REVIEW: ‘Incoming’ Is Absolutely Horrendous

Incoming still thinks it’s the early 200os, and frankly, that’s not okay. This horrendous Netflix Original movie stars a really solid young cast but with a total of maybe 6 minutes out of 90 that aren’t offensively bad. Its classic setup needs never to be run again.

Four freshmen boys are told the first week of high school is the most important week of their lives by basically everyone around them, from parents to older siblings to teachers. Of course, they buy this patently false and traumatizing sentiment and are convinced they have to behave a certain way, appease certain bullies, and attract certain women if they have any hope of making it through the next four years. So what do they do? One of them throws a party. Well, his cooler brother does, anyway.

This premise is so worn that it’s threadbare at this point. Are first impressions important? Of course. Is starting high school intimidating? It can be, sometimes. But is every high schooler a complete jerk hellbent on making freshmen miserable? Absolutely not. The way that every sibling, parent, and even teacher is shown bullying these kids and pressuring them to act a certain way is obscene. It doesn’t matter if the main character, Benj’s (Mason Thames) mom, tells him just to be himself. That isn’t how you get a 13-year-old to be himself.

Everything about Incoming is just so tired. Nobody needs a movie about people being mean to a bunch of freshmen until they learn a lesson about how they should just be glad for the friends they have. It doesn’t remotely reflect how teenagers interact with each other in 2024, let alone how adults should interact with them. Speaking of which, the entire subplot where their chemistry teacher (Bobby Cannavale) crashes the party is just so embarrassing.

Who thought this would be funny? This trope barely worked the last time Booksmart tried it, and that movie only gets a pass because at least it was a reversal of the norm because the teacher was a younger woman. Nobody needs to see a middle-aged man partying with high schoolers at a complete rager. There’s nothing funny about his scenes. It just reeks of self-insert daydreaming.

The entire structure of Incoming is wrong. The four friends are immediately broken into two separate universes within the movie, so we barely see them interact. Two of them go on some completely unrelated mission to have a fun night, not at the party, which results in the stupidest attempt at a gross-out scene, as if we haven’t seen enough of those, too. We get it. If you drink too much, you get sick. But do we have to make the person who gets sick a disgusting and unlikable hurricane of a personality in the first place? It crosses into a mean territory, as if the creators of this godawful movie have some 17-year-old girl in the back of their minds they’re trying to make fun of 20 years later.

The plot at the party gets split even further. Benj is trying to woo his sister Alyssa’s (Ali Gallo) best friend Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), who he’s got a huge crush on, while Koosh (Bardia Seiri), the party’s “host,” is spying on the guests, picking out a girl to trick into a meet-cute. Some of the movie’s scant bright spots are when you catch Benj and Bailey making eyes. Although she can play along with everyone else’s meanness a little too easily, Bailey is the only upperclassman who doesn’t outright disrespect the freshmen. Nonetheless, they’re star-crossed lovers, not only because she’s a sophomore and he’s a freshman, but because Alyssa will never let it happen.

She’s a mean girl who recently had a nose job to try and fix what she hates about herself on the inside after her girlfriend broke up with her. It’s aggravating that all of the queerness in the movie is reserved for her meanness and one annoying joke involving opening the wrong closet door. If the entire film was about Benj crushing on a guy, it might have been more exciting and less of a complete trope-fest. But, alas.

For about four minutes, the boys all live in a fantasy world where they’re nice kids who deserve the attention they’re receiving from the girls they’re pursuing. It almost made me feel bad for these kids. There’s even a sweet moment where Koosh’s brother shuffles off some of the movie’s pungent toxic masculinity.

But the movie immediately ruins it several times over and makes those moments the butt of a joke rather than the pivot moments they were set up as for the characters. Benj and Alyssa’s mom tops it off with some stupendously poor parenting when things go sideways, sealing this movie in the pits of movies that simply never should have been made.

I wish all of the kids in this movie well. They put on excellent performances, for the most part, and deserved to be in a film worthy of their time and talent and Thames’ ‘lil smile. Thankfully, the movie ends on a reasonable enough note. Lessons are learned, people get nicer, and fine, the ending is kind of iconic. But wow.

Maybe Incoming would have been acceptable in the Superbad era. But today? It’s just offensive. It’s not funny, and depicting high school like this is not okay. It’s so blatantly untrue. Not because it’s unrealistic in its depiction of partying in high school or because a teacher crashes the party. But rather, this isn’t what being a teenager is like.

Incoming is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.