Someone slipped something into my soft drink. I liked “13 Going on 30.” I wasn’t supposed to like “13 Going on 30,” for all the obvious critical reasons: It’s patently derivative of the Tom Hanks triumph “Big.” It’s cliched down to its slumber-party skivvies. It’s as predictable as a desert weather forecast.
Yet Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo bring a fizzy chemistry to this romantic fable of a teenage girl who gets her wish to be a grown-up woman who looks like, well, Jennifer Garner.
Miss Garner, the strong-cheeked, athletic beauty of TV’s “Alias,” was a teenager once, too, and one senses that her self-effacing nature here is genuine.
Toying with her superbabe persona, Miss Garner gives pratfall comedy a try, and because she has so much fun with it, viewers will, too.
Inhabiting the body of the “Alias” secret agent is young Jenna Rink (Christa B. Allen), a suburban New Jerseyite living in what for her is an awkward year, 1987. Her worries are typical. She’s unhappy with the things she has (braces) and unhappy with the things she doesn’t (breasts).
Desperate for entree into the In Crowd, she hosts a birthday party in her basement, where the cruel-cool cats play a mean joke on Jenna: They set her up for a blindfolded closet assignation with a boy she thinks is the class hunk but is really her best friend, the bright, loyal, overweight Matt.
Sprinkle some magical fairy dust on shattered Jenna, and, presto, she’s living on Park Avenue, working for big bucks at Poise magazine, the very arbiter of her young self’s idea of taste and beauty.
It’s anybody’s guess why Hollywood is so hung up on this sector of the economy — remember last year’s “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days”? — but the glossy-mag setting is a suitable pretext for the transformation that Jenna underwent during years 14 through 29.
Present-day Jenna, as she gradually learns, is an egocentric, unscrupulous snake. We see it in Matt’s expression after Jenna spends a panicky first day in her 30-year-old life and searches for familiar faces. Jenna became a “different person.”
Pudgy Matt has grown into Mr. Ruffalo as a professional photographer with a hip Village apartment and at least five CBGBs T-shirts. Despite his boho costume, Mr. Ruffalo brings low-key gravitas to his character.
Matt and Jenna are cosmically meant for one another. How to put destiny back on its rails?
Rediscover the glory of the ’80s, that’s how. “13” dredges up period nuggets such as the “Thriller” zombie dance and the Pat Benatar hit “Love Is a Battlefield.”
Now, there are problems with these sendups. A 13-year-old Jersey girl in 1987, if she wasn’t into Guns N’ Roses, would at least be up to speed on Michael Jackson’s “Bad” album, not stuck on “Thriller.” Pat Benatar’s star had burned out by then, too.
Also, Jenna is a touch too innocent for credibility: 1987 wasn’t 1957, and, unfortunately, a teenage girl would not find waking up with a naked hockey pro in her apartment all that gross.
Still, the jokes work as far as they go, and, along with an emergency magazine redesign supervised by the brilliantly smarmy Andy Serkis, they bring Jenna and Matt back together.
An eminently likable couple, and an eminently likable movie.
**1/2
TITLE: “13 Going on 30”
RATING: PG-13 (Sexual content; brief drug references)
CREDITS: Directed by Gary Winick. Produced by Susan Arnold, Gina Matthews and Donna Roth. Written by Cathy Yuspa, Josh Goldsmith and Niels Mueller. Cinematography by Don Burgess. Original music by Theodore Shapiro.
RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes.
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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