“Doin’ It” Doesn’t Do It

Doin’ It (Sara Zandieh, 2024) 2 out of 5 stars

There are, upon occasion, good teen sex comedies. It probably helps to be a teenager when you watch the film targeted at your generation—we all have those favs from our own era—but the best humor is universal in its aspirations while being specific in its details. Unfortunately, Doin’ It, from the minds of Neel Patel, Lilly Singh, and Sara Zandieh—with Zandieh (The Other Zoey) also at the helm—is never specific nor universal enough to prove engaging or funny for more than a few moments here and there. It gets laughs, but not often.

Singh stars as the adult Maya, a woman sent back to India when she was a child (played by Celine Joseph) because her divorced mother (Sonia Dhillon Tully) had concerns about her exposure to sexual ideas. Sheltered since then, Maya is now still a virgin in her late twenties. She’s also a software engineer and has big plans for a new app to help parents control the content on their kids’ phones. When she moves back to the States (mom in tow) to pitch the idea to potential investors, she gets nowhere. What does she know about today’s teens, they ask?

Good question. Despite the efforts of her childhood bestie, Jess (Sabrina Jalees, I Used to Be Funny)—an out and proud lesbian who openly shares all the facts about her own bedroom activities—Maya remains inexperienced in the ways of love, physical or otherwise. She is also clueless when it comes to teen life. But not for long, she hopes, as she takes a job as a substitute teacher at a local high school to gather research for a better version of her app.

Except she doesn’t expect to be hired to teach sex ed (she was hoping for computer engineering). That’s all they have for her, so in she goes into the deep end, head first. What ensues is a series of ostensibly comic misadventures.

The result, however, is a mishmash of tired coming-of-age motifs (we’ve seen this movie countless times before) with sex-positive empowerment the underlying principal theme (I’m all for the latter). Zandieh and Singh have fun with additional layers of cultural comedy rooted in Maya’s Indian background, but those elements are also not that novel. Strip away her mother’s accent and those facts do not differ terribly from other tradition-minded parenting from across the globe.

Still, despite the ridiculousness of the setup—there’s no school in America that would allow something even close to this particular class, nor is there any likelihood that the revised version of Maya’s app would strike it big—and the clichés on display (including the raunchy best friend), Singh and Zandieh and the cast manage to elicit some genuine chuckles here and there. The successful jokes are too few and far between, though. They just don’t do it.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.