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Critical Response to Incoming
New to Netflix on August 23, 2024, Incoming has enjoyed great steaming success despite ranking as one of 2024’s worst feature film comedies. The story concerns a quartet of first-year high school students overcoming great trepidation as they gear up to attend their first high school party. The derivative paint-by-numbers comedy by first-time filmmaking siblings Dave and John Chernin adds nothing new to the subgenre, calling to mind much funnier examples such as Porky‘s, American Pie, and Superbad.
Yet, despite earning a lowly 13% Rotten Tomatoes score, the sophomoric teen comedy has found a viewership groove on the streaming platform that continues to favor quantity over quality to accommodate the current binge-watching trend. Over the past weekend, Incoming ranked behind only The Union as Netflix’s most-watched movie in the U.S., further magnifying Netflix’s biggest existential question – at what point do bad products stop being rewarded with high viewership numbers? To find out, a closer examination of Incoming is necessary.
What Is Incoming About?
Written and directed by first-time filmmakers Dave and John Chernin, Incoming feels like the work of inexperienced amateurs from the get-go. The story involves four incoming high school first-year students — Benj (Mason Thames), Eddie (Ramon Reed), Connor (Raphael Alejandro), and Koosh (Bardia Seiri) — as they grapple with peer pressure, social optics, and awkward romances ahead of and during their first high school party. Unlike the best Netflix teen shows like Sex Education, Incoming fails to deliver insightful glimpses into modern-day teenage life.
As Benj tries to impress his school crush, sophomore Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), Connor expresses insecurity about not hitting puberty yet. Meanwhile, Eddie detests his mother’s rich new boyfriend, Dennis (Scott MacArthur). Koosh has his eyes set on dating a senior who will boost his reputation in the eyes of his older, bullying brother. With each student having their cross to bear ahead of the big high school party that will test their friendship and moral steel, the derivative movie falls into a morass of clichés, rote platitudes, and raunchy teen movie trappings that only make viewers pine for much better high school comedies that cover familiar territory.
Incoming’s Pros & Cons
To its credit, Incoming attempts to sidestep the overly socially conscious climate where modern-day comedies often suffer a slow, painful death. However, the attempts at edgy, envelope-pushing jokes about TikTok, K-holes, and other contemporary trends usually fall flat and end up more awkward and uncomfortable than cool and transgressive. Blame must be placed on the Chernins, who come from the world of television with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Mick, where broad jokes almost always land better on network TV than in a feature film. Indeed, the film looks and feels more like a speculative TV pilot than a feature film poised to withstand time.
Even the attempts to reunite former It’s Always Sunny and The Mick stars like Kaitlin Olsen, and MacArthur in Incoming, who understand how to deliver the Chernins’ lines with expert comedic timing, the results flounder and call to mind funnier material. Hovering over the entire film like a specter is what The Guardian’s review refers to as, “The film has the consistently distracting sheen of a made-for-streaming film, making for cheap comparison to its inspirations.”
Critical Response to Incoming
Far from alone, The Guardian is joined by most professional critics who believe Incoming is one of 2024’s worst comedies. With a 41 Metascore and 13% Rotten Tomatoes rating, the film feels like a chintzy, made-for-streaming rehash of much funnier teen comedies full of heart to balance the raunchy shock value. For example, The New York Times review reads:
“A generous interpretation is that “Incoming” is derivative as an act of loving homage. In practice, it just feels old hat. The movie is heavily indebted to the teen gross-out comedies of the late 1990s and early 2000s, like “American Pie” and “Van Wilder,” which were themselves indebted to the teen sex comedies of the 1980s, like “Porky’s” and “Screwballs,” and it’s so far from an original idea or point of view that it’s hard to see the point.”
Beyond the unoriginal nature of the plot, which cannot justify its existence, Incoming has been criticized for being too safe despite its attempt at edgy, R-rated raunchiness. Due to the moral backbones of the four teenagers who unconvincingly cling to ethical behavior in ways that prevent them from exhausting the limits of the movie’s R-rated potential, Incoming promises one thing yet delivers something else. Something far less subversive, and as a result, something not very funny. Even the moments of sweetness come too fast and feel unearned, leaving nothing to cling to but eye-rolling jokes and gross-out gags. Over time, Incoming will neither stand out as a teen movie nor an all-time great R-rated comedy.
When the movie does provide the boys with high dramatic stakes, they often resolve themselves too easily and fail to convince viewers of the consequences. Per Variety’s review:
“Incoming moves on too quickly for such mortifying pauses to register. The result mostly resembles a sitcom pilot, with somewhat plain characters now established to plug into more absurd and complex situations, with the promise of looping back to status quo by the end of each episode. As a standalone, “Incoming” hits its marks, but its cast amounts to a collection of tics, while its appetite for raunch seems unfulfilled.”
Of course, the critical misgivings mean nothing to Netflix. As long as movies like Incoming draw high viewership numbers, the platform will continue to produce them like assembly line factory products. The platform has clearly stated its mission to make quantity over quality entertainment to give viewers as much bingeable content as possible. Until viewers hold the streamer accountable by not watching unfunny comedic homages to much funnier movies, comedies of Incoming‘s ilk will continue to dominate the platform ad infinitum. Incoming currently ranks #2 on the U.S. viewership charts, behind only the Halle Berry/Mark Wahlberg action movie The Union, also a forgettable affair with little replay value.
Incoming is available to stream on Netflix.