Colfer, who also scripted, stars as a slight variant on his Glee character: another perky, beleaguered, expressive overachiever who foresees a stellar career, once he can shake the cowshit off his feet and escape his boring small-town home. But whereas on Glee his ticket to fame is a crystalline falsetto and intimate knowledge of every Broadway musical ever made, in Struck By Lightning, he longs for a glowing writing career, beginning with acceptance at Northwestern University. Hoping to impress the NU admissions board, he starts a school literary journal, which earns nothing but contempt from his shallow, villainous peers. So with the help of spacey writer-wannabe Rebel Wilson (playing a much vaguer, more timid version of her usual brassy diva in the likes of Pitch Perfect), he starts blackmailing them into participating.
Lightning is a funny, fast-moving movie, packed with barbed one-liners, goofy hyperbole, and all the oversized exasperation of teen angst. But it’s too acid, particularly where Colfer is concerned. His character is a self-satisfied, contemptuous pill who always has a bon mot to hand out and who inevitably wins every battle of wits with his mooing classmates, but he comes across as too smug and superior; the film feels like a screenwriter’s revenge against everyone who ever bullied or doubted him. It’s a victory fantasy that doesn’t let the opposition score a single point. Colfer’s script also pushes too far into weepy Hallmark Channel drama via a senile grandma character who can’t recognize Colfer, which lets her inadvertently deliver sentimental yet sharp wisdom about him to his face. And Allison Janney, as Colfer’s depressed, pill-addicted, unsupportive mother, delivers an emotional performance that belongs in a serious drama rather than a playfully tart teen farce. There’s plenty of talent on display in Struck By Lightning, but it isn’t always pulling in the same direction, and Saved! writer-director Brian Donnelly doesn’t exert enough authorial control to make it cohere. Colfer’s career-making work on Glee may have influenced him too heavily as a writer: His debut film has a similar sense of snarky fun, a similar sense of high drama, and a similar difficulty reconciling them.
