Snack Shack 2024

Snack Shack starts so suddenly, so chaotically, you can almost feel someone say “and they’re off” — and not just because it picks up, in media res, at a racetrack betting station.

AJ (Conor Sherry) and Moose (Gabriel Labelle, fresh from his turn in The Fabelmans) are 14 years old and entering the summer after their Freshman year. Obsessed with get-rich-quick schemes, the pair is constantly bending and outright breaking rules to achieve their goal. After one too many busts, AJ is threatened with boot camp in the fall if he doesn’t get a real job. The boys rummage up enough money to rent the snack shack attached to the local community pool, and launch their very own business. With generic bullies wreaking havoc, a generic female character causing cliche hormonal discord between the boys, and generically strict parents, the film follows a well-trodden path through a coming-of-age summer plot housing next to no surprises.

Sherry and Labelle speak to each other with such familiarity, quickness, and excitability that it’s occasionally easy to miss what they’re saying, particularly on Labelle’s side as Moose — he gets excited, and his vocal articulators abandon him. Aside from those brief moments of muddled dialogue, Labelle gives a strong performance full of youthfully ignorant passion, heart and truth. Unfortunately, opposite of this, Sherry’s performance as AJ is surprisingly weak. An almost imperceptible perma-smirk robs his performance of much believability, despite a winning amount of earnestness. However, when these boys begin cooking up their next scheme, their excitement is palpable and often manifests itself in appropriately physical ways, usually the most teenage-boy way possible — playful aggression.

Seemingly taking a page from 1978's Grease, the film is hard-pressed to pass Sherry and Labelle (both in the early 20s) as 14-year-old boys. Their ages are a relatively unimportant detail, but it’s talked about enough times in the screenplay to warrant mention here. There’s a valiant effort to make them appear younger by sizing up every piece of clothing they wear, but it’s not enough. On the topic of wrong ages, production design itself suffers from anachronistic choices throughout. For a film that’s meant to be happening in 1991, both of the lead boys are styled much like any Gen Z teenager would be today. While the film is battling the 2020s vogue of resurgent 1990s style, the lack of attention to detail, particularly in the hair styling, continued to remind me that this movie was made post-COVID.

Despite the troubles that this movie has with performances and aesthetic, there is a charm that’s hard to deny. You can often feel the warmth of the Nebraska summer and smell the pungent mixture of sugar and microwaved hot dogs, while the juvenile thrills of rule-breaking and overwhelming desire are as vicariously exciting as ever. Though they both appear well over their proclaimed ages, the boys both exude a youthful innocence and hubris that informs every decision they make, bringing us along as they learn the lessons that so many have learned on screen before them.

Snack Shack has small but specific ambitions, and it achieves them.