PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 4/23/04)

At age 32, actress Jennifer Garner seems to have no trouble maintaining her girl-next-door charm and bubblegum-sweetness. Playing dress-up week after week on her spy show Alias, Garner already comes across as a girl trapped inside an adult’s body. Not only is she the perfect leading lady for 13 Going on 30, the film is the ideal vehicle to introduce her to a whole new legion of fans.

The latest in a distinguished line of body-swapping comedies, 13 Going on 30 most closely resembles Tom Hanks’s Big, in which a picked-on kid wakes up in a grown-up’s body. The twist here (besides the obvious gender switch) is that 13-year-old Jenna Rink’s wish actually whisks her forward in time 17 years. A child of the ’80s, Jenna awakens in the year 2004, where she’s drop-dead gorgeous and working as the editor of her favorite fashion magazine.

It’s a dream come true—literally. Jenna manages to avoid all the rough stuff teen girls endure and skip straight to adulthood. (I suspect the reason her character wishes to be 30 instead of 16 or 18 or even 21 owes to the screenwriters’ wisdom, not hers.) But as it turns out, Jenna’s future self isn’t a very nice person. In fact, she’s downright rotten. The backstabbers who betrayed her in junior high are now her best friends, and she has totally snubbed the chubby kid who was always there for her. To make matters worse, she realizes how much she likes him (it helps that he’s grown up to be Mark Ruffalo) just as he’s about to marry someone else.

Garner is irresistible, single-handedly turning a clever movie into a genuine crowd-pleaser, especially for teen girls past and present. Even the office intrigue works (although I felt cheated when Jenna pawns off a version of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog as a way to represent "real people"). The movie might have gone further in exploring how much of the characters’ adult personalities depends on the suffering they endured as teenagers, but as it stands, 13 Going on 30 is nearly perfect in its own cotton-candy way.

—Peter Debruge