There’s a nifty inversion that comes to mind when watching “Doin’’ It” that Phil Lord and Chris Miller previously pulled off with “21 Jump Street,” recognizing that one way to freshen up a high school-set movie for the 21st century was to knock jocks from their traditional perch at the top of the food chain and make geeks, with their brighter future prospects as tech CEOs and coders, the lions instead. At Proudemore High School in Sara Zandieh’s amiable third feature, everyone’s a Hummingbird, but the students are all far more savvy than their new sex ed teacher Maya (Lilly Singh), who sought out a position at the school to gather research for her target demographic for an app she’s developing, yet rather than being placed in computer sciences as she had hoped, she is thrown into a class where she’s feeling more exposed than she’s ever been in a bedroom when she’s maintained her virginity.
It’s rare in a sex comedy that the driving idea behind it is more provocative than any of the wild exploits destined to occur, but in “Doin’ It,” there is a definite charge from how chastity is seen as a choice that Maya has only partially made for herself, long inhibited by the memory of an embarrassing public incident with a boy when she was a 13-year-old in Ohio and she was soon shuttled back to her parents’ native India after concerns that she might be growing up too fast. America beckons her back, as well as her mother Veena (Sonia Dhillon Tully), by the time she’s in her early thirties and an entrepreneur, intent on providing information to teens that she didn’t have growing up via her new app, but describing herself as “more of an HTML type of girl more than an STD type of girl,” she is hardly prepared to interface with a classroom full of teens who by and large seem to have more sexual experience than she does.
Co-written by Singh in addition to starring in it, “Doin’ It” is clearly geared to the strengths of its star who rose to fame on YouTube with brash and irreverent viral videos, bringing the same energy to the big screen that made her a sensation online. Singh acquits herself well with a real character to play beyond her personality in what is typically bumpy transition for most, and Zandieh surely deserves a lot of credit for making a slick and zippy studio-level comedy for the big screen while consciously catering to crowds conditioned for continuous hits of dopamine. What does become a bit awkward is reconciling the desire of “Doin’ It” to be an ensemble comedy when it’s designed to be a star vehicle. A slightly bloated backend results from having to pay off all the characters and subplots it introduces throughout, and there’s a slight sense of missed opportunity with spiky yet brief appearances from Ana Gasteyer, Mary Holland and Stephanie Beatriz, who makes the strongest impression as a cafeteria worker with a multimillion dollar mansion, as Maya’s fellow faculty, not to mention the many students who don’t have the time to distinguish themselves much from one another.
For all the vibrator gags and full frontal flashes that make it into “Doin’ It,” there’s also curiously never a feeling of danger to the proceedings, but that actually becomes a mark of success when sex is made to feel as if it’s not something to be afraid of. Less edgy than most of its ilk but pushing the envelope in an entirely different way, “Doin’ It” is in on a bigger joke of how pushing honest conversations about sex away has had a damaging effect on the culture as a whole. It can be inferred from the number of MDs in the executive producer credits that Singh, Zandieh and co-writer Neel Patel drew on professional help to create the sex ed course in the film, and as Maya spices up lessons on contraception and family planning, the knowledge is obviously intended to extend beyond the screen to a younger audience that could use them. But that isn’t only way the comedy feels rooted in something real and beyond its noble intentions, “Doin’ It”’s emotional authenticity is what makes the laughs linger a little longer from its most outrageous moments, putting hysteria in its rightful place.
“Doin’ It” does not yet have U.S. distribution.
