Snack Shack review: coming-of-age comedy is big on energy, light on laughs

Snack Shack, director Adam Rehmeier’s latest aggro-comedy, opens with an unusual sight: A pair of 14-year-old boys chainsmoking at the dog track. Amid a string of shouted expletives, with the words “fuck” and “pussy” enhancing every other word and giggle, our heroes, A.J. (Connor Sherry) and Moose (Gabriel LaBelle), hit it big before hightailing it to the bus leaving the field trip they’re supposed to be on. Like Licorice Pizza’s Gary Valentine, these enterprising adolescents constantly run from scheme to scheme, chasing dollars with proto-grindset glee. If only watching the movie were half as fun as they seem to be having. Unfortunately, most of Snack Shack’s humor goes down like skunked beer.

Splitting the difference between Greg Mottola’s Superbad and Adventureland, Snack Shack attempts to capture the former’s chaos and the latter’s sentimentality. Set in Nebraska City, Nebraska, in 1991, A.J. and Moose, on the brink of parental punishment over a disastrous homebrew operation, procure a public pool’s snack bar. It’s a promising premise that Rehmeier’s script overcomplicates. Characters move in and out of the film with reckless abandon, offering no clarification on their role or relationship to the boys. Shane (Nick Robinson), an older neighborhood friend who recently returned from Desert Storm to drive drunk around town, fills in for A.J.’s older brother, yet we never learn much about their history together. A new girl, Brooke (Mika Abdalla), takes on the plum spot of an inevitable source of conflict for the boys. When the movie pulls a tragic Hail Mary in the third act, it feels like a cheap stunt to My Girl-up the film’s emotional resonance.

Across Snack Shack and 2020’s satirically muddled and weirdly hateful Dinner In America, Rehmeier has established a knack for atmosphere and tone. His actors’ interplay with the camera can overcome his script’s messy hostility and haphazard provocations. Filmed on location in Nebraska, he creates an evocative sense of space so palpable you can feel the summer breeze flowing through your hair.

Where Rehmeier falters is arguably more critical than good cinematography: Jokes. For all its “fucks,” “shits,” and “that’s piss, ain’t it”s, Snack Shack shouts hopeful catchphrases at full volume, drowning out laughs as quickly as they arrive. There’s no foundation for what constitutes normal behavior; without the contrast, there’s no space for punchlines. No matter how hard LaBelle sells “Fuck Dog,” laughing through his line reads with infectious looseness, none of Rehmeier’s quirks quite track. Things like A.J.’s auctioneer mother (Gillian Vigman, reprising her Holdovers role as a military school-threatening matriarch) and his cross-examining father (David Costabile) feel like details that should be followed up on, or at least called back, but they’re dropped as quickly as they arrive.

Snack Shack shows how hard it is to do what Danny McBride and Jody Hill do. Their aggression shines in the give and take. Someone has to react to the absurdity here. That person is supposedly A.J., the uptight one who also operates an illicit alcohol operation, smokes cigarettes when his parents are home, and performs straight-man duties only when necessary. It’s not that we need “fuck dogs” off the menu, but without the reaction to give dynamism to the scene, jokes sit there, becoming another slightly weird thing in a film filled with slightly weird things.

Even with the script’s problems, the film is kinetic, and as in Dinner In America, Rehmeier gets terrific performances from his cast. With the frame of Freaks & Geeks’ Sam Weir, Sherry holds the camera without a hint of self-consciousness as he dances, sneezes, and pratfalls around the screen. LaBelle bursts with macho energy as his hyper-confident, jacked-as-hell 14-year-old attacks each scene with joy and speed. Supporting players like Vigman make meals out of Rehmeier’s forced idiosyncracies, selling them through sheer will of performance. Whether in an impressive one-shot through a teen booze party or A.J. and Moose flipping burgers and fries in their mouths in the back of a speeding pick-up, Rehmeier constructs an intoxicating teenage dreamworld.

What’s missing are moments where they act like actual human children. Snack Shack is the kind of movie we long to see more of. Sharply performed, personal comedies that appeal to broad audiences come along too infrequently. But these episodic coming-of-age stories work best when the script isn’t so busy forcing its characters to have fun. Snack Shack should feel like Summer School, not summer school.