There isn’t quite much to say about Wet Behind the Ears, other than that it is a polarizing viewing experience. At times, it can be frank, funny, quirky, and scathing in its satirical observation on the millennial generation. At other times, it can be just as empty and aimless as the generation it satirizes. The protagonist is a naïve but well-meaning young girl named Samantha Phelps (Margaret Keane Williams), who has just failed her first job interview and is now, like many of the millennial generation, unemployed and lost.  We also follow Samantha’s best friend Vicky (Jessica Piervicenti) who in contrast has a job and is doing quite well for herself except for the fact that she has to, lord-help-her, live with another person in the apartment that she and Samantha were supposed to share. Except, Samantha has no job and thus, cannot go forward with the lease plans.

So the film initially starts off with an interesting and hilarious premise, one that seems to be both self-deprecating and serious about its protagonist’s journey. Samantha is not the stereotypical incompetent blond she appears to be; at least not in comparison to say, the blond duo protagonists from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, but she is still a character that makes us wonder why we should care in the first place. She is simply like most kids in their 20s today: looking for any sort of job.  The various other minor characters that surround her and Vicky are mostly caricatures that often come across as over-the-top in their cold, ridiculous demeanor. At times it seems as if they were drawn from 90s Nickelodeon cartoon characters.

Director and co-writer Sloan Copeland seems to have a hard time balancing characters between archetypes and true human figures that we see day to day.  The humor, though at times funny, gets stale after awhile, mostly relying on Samantha and Vicky’s strange encounters with these various over-the-top side characters, such as her apartment roommates, the woman at the ice cream shop that over-zealously tries every flavor on the menu and the “screw crew”, who were the first group of kids in high school to lose their virginity. It is all quite amusing in moderation but as the movie progresses, it seems that these characters are just there to make the protagonists more appealing and relatable.

The film’s directionless arc becomes only more apparent as it approaches its end and one can probably guess how it’ll all end by the midway point. Wet Behind the Ears isn’t necessary a bad film. But its tendency to over-dramatize the severity of the character’s plight comes off as a bit self-entitled; these characters really have no one to blame for their problems but themselves.