So I finally got to see what the whole High School Musical craze was all about. After the screams of every twelve-year-old girl in America made Zac Efron into a household name, after High School Musical 2 scored an absurdly high eighteen million viewers when it debuted on the Disney Channel in summer 2007, after those nude photos of Vanessa Hudgens leaked online — I have to admit I was kind of perversely curious to see High School Musical 3: Senior Year.

My conclusion: mostly harmless.

That’s not the same as “good,” mind you. The thing that surprised me the most was that all the songs were total crap. They weren’t even good in a tweeny, annoyingly catchy kind of way. Heck, it seemed like only one or two of them even tried to be catchy — most were just forgettable, with a heavy synthesizer that obscured the cast’s otherwise impressive voices and some of the most laughable lyrics you will ever hear.

I’m not bashing the music because I’m a music snob. I’m not. Your average late-’90s boy band hit single was better than most of the songs in this movie.

I haven’t seen the first two movies, so I don’t know how big everyone’s roles used to be, but Zac Efron (who bagged a reported $3 million to come back) is the clear star in Senior Year. To those unfamiliar — everyone without kids over the age of sixteen — Efron plays Troy Bolton, a basketball star at his high school. He’s dating the adorable Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) and is best friends with the floppy-haired Chad (Corbin Bleu), who himself is dating class overachiever Taylor (Monique Coleman, who has almost nothing to do in this movie). Then there’s the scheming Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale), who’s perpetually trying to break Troy and Gabriella up, and her flaming twin brother Ryan (Lucas Grabeel).

All of these actors are bright, appealing, great dancers, and refreshingly multicultural (at least for Disney standards). Efron actually does have some leading-man charisma, and I was also impressed with Grabeel, even though the script shoehorns in an awkward scene in which he asks a girl to the prom. She accepts, but then we never see them at the prom, nor in fact do we ever see them even having a conversation again. Why not just be open about his sexuality? I promise, it’s obvious to everyone at his high school, and nobody seems to have a problem with it.

The other actors are a bit more limited. Tisdale seems to have figured out the best way to portray an over-the-top diva is to move her shoulders a lot. A lot. If you end up