Overlooked Movies: Barely Lethal (2015)

I'd never heard of this movie that came out a couple of years ago until Livia came across it while looking for comedies. The premise is pretty ridiculous: a top-secret, quasi-governmental program takes orphans and trains them from childhood to be assassins and secret agents. One of these agents, a teenage girl played by Hailee Steinfeld, fakes her own death during a mission to get out of the program, adopts a new identity as a foreign exchange student, and enrolls in a suburban high school, only to find that it's tougher than the world of international espionage. In order to prepare for this, she approaches it like a mission and "gathers intel", which consists of watching a bunch of teen romantic comedy movies. Misunderstandings and hijinks ensue, until her past eventually catches up to her in the form of a vicious arms dealer (Jessica Alba) who wants to kill her.

So yeah, it's all pretty silly . . . but the movie plays it pretty straight, and if you buy into the premise, BARELY LETHAL is a lightweight but fairly entertaining little action comedy. We've watched a lot of teen romantic comedies over the years, and this movie does a pretty good job of having fun with the stereotypes. The cast, which includes Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark on GAME OF THRONES) as a rival agent and Samuel L. Jackson as the head of the training program, is okay. Not a great film, but I enjoyed watching it and stayed awake the whole time, which says something for it.