A Week Away, Netflix’s High School Musical-style play for the contemporary Christian teen market, feels strangely unrooted from our timeline. The musical about a week at a Christian summer camp, directed by Roman White, is ostensibly set in the present yet transparently derives its musical and choreography cues from mid-2000s Disney projects like the aforementioned series and Camp Rock, and lead Kevin Quinn looks eerily like Zac Efron circa 2009. It’s a coming-of-age (and faith) movie in which there are barely any phones to be found.
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The film opens with a premise too pat and aloof to suspend one’s disbelief: wayward orphan Will Hawkins (Quinn) has stolen a cop car, among a slew of petty crimes, and the consequence? After polite arrest for running from an officer with guitar case in hand, a polite admonishment from Children and Family Services about the threat of juvie (yes, this teen is white; no, this film does not seem at all cognizant of how this plays after last summer’s protests against anti-black police brutality, or of race at all). Luckily for Will, he’s swiftly fostered by a black mother, Kristin (Sherri Shepherd), and her son George (Jahbril Cook) on the condition that he spend a week at the Christian summer camp where Kristin works.