High School Musical 3: Just Like the Title Says

From the moment we open onto a close-up of Zac Efron’s sweaty, slow-motion face, it’s clear what we can expect from High School Musical 3. There will be basketball. There will be dance numbers. There will be teen angst, and romance and breakups, and peer pressure and awesomely awful outfits and lots of mugging for the camera and a single, chaste kiss.

In short, it will be a High School Musical movie.

If you’ve never seen the previous two, I’d recommend skipping straight to this one. The budget is bigger, and the actors are more experienced, and the result is a movie that’s vastly superior to its predecessors (although it’s still not, strictly speaking, good).

And trust me, you’ll catch on quickly to the plot, such as it is. Here’s what you need to know:

1.    Zac Efron, that guy with the annoying hair who’s on all the magazine covers, plays Troy, the main character. Troy is a basketball-playing stud.
2.    Vanessa Hudgens, that girl who was in the naked pictures on PerezHilton.com last year, plays Gabriella. Gabriella hearts Troy.
3.    Assorted supporting cast members are also there to fill out the diversity quota, make life harder for Troy and Gabriella, and be funny (both funny ha-ha and the other kind).

New in this installment, we also meet three of the new kids who are aiming to step into the empty sneakers of the retiring Efron & co. in HSM4. They’re actually not bad ? I particularly enjoyed the British drama-queen-in-training ? but really, what’s the point of a watching one of these movies if you won’t get to see Zac Efron pout?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The subtitle for HSM3 is “Senior Year,” and appropriately, the story focuses on the kids making decisions about their post-high-school lives. In one of the more ludicrous plot developments, Juilliard announces that it will award one scholarship to an East High student. They’re considering drama club king and queen Ryan and Sharpay (who absolutely do not need scholarships, given that their parents own a helicopter), as well as Kelsi, who as a 17-year-old musical theater composer might actually deserve to get into Juilliard, and Troy, who ? wait, Troy? The same Troy who spent the last two movies being dragged kicking and screaming into the musical productions? Well, whatever. Now that Juilliard is interested in Troy, Troy is interested in Juilliard, and much of the movie’s angst quotient hinges on Troy being torn between majoring in basketball (apparently you can do that at “U of A”) and majoring in theater. Kids, you have the rest of your lives to decide how you’re going to screw up your careers. You’re 17. Your main priority is supposed to be losing your virginity.

Ah, but this is Disney.

And anyway, enough plot. We have songs to sing!

HSM3 has more songs than the last two, and they’re better songs too. (Which, again, isn’t to say that they’re necessarily good. It’s all relative, here.) My favorites included the fantasy number where Ryan and Sharpay wore sparkly outfits and forced the rest of the cast to be bit players (in a sequence that featured Gabriella in a maid’s outfit, which I’m pretty sure is racist, and didn’t Disney ban racism after Aladdin? But then they also banned naked pictures of their underage female stars and look how that worked out). Another highlight was the 80s-retro-style junkyard duet between Troy and BFF Chad that included a crew of backup hip-hop dancers who were actually talented. There’s also a song entitled “Scream” that consists of Troy breaking into the school at night in a hoodie and sliding around the walls like he’s in outer space, and a series of romantic ballads sung from atop a variety of treehouses, rooftops, and pianos.

If the very idea of seeing a movie called High School Musical makes you cringe and look over your shoulder to see if anyone’s around to judge you, then HSM3 isn’t for you. It does not transcend its genre. It doesn’t drop in a lot of wink-wink nudge-nudge jokes for the adults in the audience, like the overly ironic DreamWorks kids’ movies always do.

What it does do is deliver on its premise. There is a high school and a musical and all the cheesiness one would expect therein. But this time around, it doesn’t feel cheesy so much as sweet. The High School Musical movies have always been thoroughly divorced from the reality of the American high school experience, but somehow, that’s less irritating when the production values are high and the songs are coming fast and furious and Zac Efron is doing his Zac Efron-y thing.

Hey, I bet if they threw an extra few million dollars at the new “90210,” it wouldn’t be so bad, either.