“[Samoas] are for closers.” If I might paraphrase Glengarry Glen Ross. And for those who didn’t experience 1992, lemme put it this way: the Birdie Scouts are pretty cut throat; watch your tail-feathers.
Having seen such hard-hitting girl scout exposés as Troop Beverly Hills, The Pacifier, and The Boss, I knew what I was in for: scouting issues solved with kung fu, nunchucks, or some fool thing. Imagine my surprise when this turned out to be a genuine movie! Go figure.
I don’t know who names southern children in motherless families, but it sure could use some improvement. I’d have settled for “Scout” long ahead of Christmas Flint (Mckenna Grace). (Doncha think “Scout” ight have been a pretty good name here?) If I ever found out that a friend had named their child “Christmas,” I could offer nothing more than , “Yule be sorry.” Christmas is engaging, open, curious, and determined. You know, the exact things we look for in a protagonist holiday. She is, unfortunately, also wet-the-bed unpopular, probably because the 11(?)-year-old has a bed-wetting problem.
Unpopularity has not stopped the child from being herself. Though she gets bullied by the Birdie Scouts, who are simply a better class of people in 1970s Georgia, Christmas can’t wait to carol alongside when she hears they have a chance of messaging the universe. You see, Christmas is interested in things way beyond the North Pole, and the Birdie Troop that wins the upcoming jamboree gets to put their tweets out on a message to space.
You probably couldn’t guess this, but given what’s at stake, Christmas takes it upon herself to collect the town’s losers and form Troop Zero, the Bad News Bears of scouting. It’s easy to be cynical here – the Christmas cookies our hero collects include the one-eyed God girl, the not-assigned-female-at-birth-kid, the farter, and a bad girl who goes by “Hell-No.” Well, gosh, that seems incomplete, doesn’t it? What about the wheelchair tragedy, the arsonist, the “screams at all stimuli” trainwreck, and the elephant kid-man? Perhaps I shouldn’t make this any harder on Troop Zero. Serious question: whom would you rather have as a den mother, Viola Davis or Allison Janney?
Troop Zero was a surprise. I expected Troop Beverly Hills in which the script would eventually bend towards the underdogs just because it’s a movie or The Boss in which the film became about the adults instead of the children. Neither of these things happened. From beginning to end, the hero is Christmas and her lopsided self-cut hair. And the climax -so easily dismissed in films like this- invoked About a Boy rather than the Bolshoi Ballet, which is to say there was pain and courage and not an ounce of professionalism, which speaks to a better movie than the one I’d imagined.
A message for all uniformed rookies
(And you can take this straight to your bookies)
When it comes to girl scouts
Though I have serious doubts
Apparently there’s more there than cookies
Rated PG, 94 Minutes
Directors: Katie Ellwood, Amber Templemore-Finlayson
Writers: Lucy Alibar
Genre: Childhood sucks
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Tina from “Bob’s Burgers”
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Bullies
