ill Stronghold (Angarano) has a lot to live up to because of his successful parents. They are, after all, the world's greatest superheroes, The Commander (Russell) and Jetstream (Preston). In between selling real estate (their cover story), the Strongholds fight crime, battle giants and prepare their son for high school.
Of course, Will isn't going to any ordinary high school. He's headed for a gifted school where teens are taught to develop their super powers. When they're boarding the bus, the crazed driver (Heffernan) takes them skyrocketing to the clouds, where the secret school is run by Principal Powers (Carter), with a faculty who have their own super talents.
One of the first things that newcomers to the school do is show off their own personal powers, and Coach Boomer (Campbell) separates the students into "heroes" or "hero support"—the more derogatory name is "sidekick." Much to everyone's surprise, the son of the world's most famous superheroes is hiding the fact that he has no powers at all. He's relegated to sidekick status, along with his childhood friend Layla (Panabaker), who has the power to control nature but doesn't like to show it off.
Will's friends include some misfit sidekicks like Ethan (Dee-Jay Daniels), who can melt into a puddle of goo on demand, Zach (Nicholas Braun), who glows ever so slightly, and Magenta (Kelly Vitz), who shapeshifts, but only into a purple guinea pig. Meanwhile, the cutest girl in school, Gwen, (Winstead) who's a technopath who controls machines with her mind, takes a liking to Will. But Will also has an instant enemy in Warren Peace (Strait), who is smoldering about the fact that the Commander put his father in jail for life. Warren Peace's mother is a superhero, and his father is a supervillain, and when the kid gets angry, he shoots fireballs out of his hands.
Meanwhile, Will doesn't know how to talk to his parents, he's unaware that his best friend is in love with him, and he's infatuated with Gwen, who has some nefarious plans of her own.
Smells like teen super spirit
Inevitably this is going to be compared quite a bit to the family of superheroes in The Incredibles, but that's because it's a family with super powers. The sorting out of the students as "sidekicks" and "heroes" also feels a bit like wizard's hat in Harry Potter that assigns the dormitories, but other than that, Sky High is rather original.
All of the usual teen problems brought up in a youth movie also crop up here, but they're amped way up because of the raw super powers that these kids have raging inside them, and they're not sure how to control them yet.
This is one of the rare kids movies that adults will enjoy, too, like The Incredibles. Adults will like the casting of Wonder Woman as the principal and Ash from the Evil Dead movies as the kooky coach. They'll like the fact that funny guys from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe and The Kids in the Hall have outrageous comedic moments.
Some special effects seem a bit overblown and almost unnecessary, and the final prom scene heads dangerously close to Carrie. But inevitably the story ends up as expected, and anything that may seem momentarily scary gets resolved nicely.
The idea was originally pitched by Paul Hernandez as a TV series, and with the major interest in science fiction and superheroes in movies and TV today, it seems like this is a great segue to television, perhaps with some of the movie's cast, like Fame or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it has the potential charm of a Greatest American Hero series.
We have entered a time in entertainment when it's almost unnecessary to explain backstories about powers, where people got them and how people deal with them. Now we're entering an exploration of how people live day to day with their special gifts and how that sometimes can be a big pain. For teens, it's also obviously going to be very funny.
