Images courtesy of Aura Entertainment
DOIN’ IT— 3 STARS
Finally getting a theatrical release over a year after its debut at the 2024 SXSW Film and TV Festival, Doin’ It is landing at a very opportune time for its intended purposes. Starring the multi-talented Lilly Singh, the sex farce comedy flies a bunting’s worth of freak flags, all of them willfully fluttering with pride and wantonness in the face of pearl-clutching prudeness and opposition. While it stumps for modernity to do away with antiquated thinking on a few topics, Doin’ It also turns back the clock to bring back a downright horny level of raunch, a tone setting long abandoned by studios and missed by plenty of audiences.
Singh stars as Maya and begins Doin’ It chronicling the culminating moment of her failed Americanization in the Aughts occurring at a high school talent show alongside her bestie Jess when she was the curious and careless age of 15 (played in flashback by Ranam’s Celine Joseph) during the Aughts. Singh’s narration chalks it up to being “focused on getting that D and instead getting straight As.” Let’s just call what transpires “The Jizz Incident” and leave it at that. Nevertheless, the public fallout led Maya’s embarrassed single mother, Veena (Sonia Dhillon Tully of Netflix’s Wedding Season), to pick up the family and move back to India, as a drastic measure to purify her daughter and cement the extreme and desired conservative values.
Now 30 and aspiring to be a successful app designer as a computer engineer, Maya returns with Veena and her grandmother to the United States for better job opportunities. Besides that, what she really wants to do is cast aside those virtuous moral shackles for another taste of that American freedom and culture she sorely missed. After reconnecting with Jess (prolific TV comedy writer Sabrina Jalees), Maya is single and ready to mingle with only one romantic impairment for Doin’ It.
She’s still a virgin. Cue the telenovela gasp!
This bucket list challenge, of sorts, leads the proud lesbian Jess to make it her mission to help Maya get over that hump, literally and figuratively. Meanwhile, Maya is finding no luck on the job market, causing her to consider becoming a classroom aide or substitute teacher for some type of income. With every silly crease of a happenstance comedy wrinkle, fate grants her a temporary short-term position teaching—get this—sex education to high schoolers under the loosey-goosey guidance of a miserably beleaguered school principal (Saturday Night Live alum Ana Gasteyer)
LESSON #1: THE THANKLESS JOB OF BEING A SUBSTITUTE TEACHER— Let’s pause for a moment with Doin’ It and talk about the thankless job of being a substitute teacher. Take it from the 24-year veteran educator writing this review. Students nowadays, especially teenagers, barely respect solid veteran teachers, let alone a random citizen, answering the “those who cannot do, teach” employment desperation, tossed into a busy classroom with little to no plans or qualified classroom experience. Subs are a big ingredient in the recipe for disaster. The expressions “fake it ‘til you make it” and “good help is hard to find” constantly have competing merit when it comes to this job role.
Wouldn’t you know it, Maya overcomes some initial steamrolling from the colorful cast of high school stereotypes in her class (including the very loquacious fresh faces of Dream Scenario’s Jessica Clement, Sydney Topliffe of Davey and Jonesy’s Locker, Christian Martyn of Anne with an E, and Orphan Black: Echoes ensemble member Jaeden Noel) to put her foot down, toss out the crappy curriculum, and design her own learning opportunities. The kids take a liking to them, warm to her newfound smarts, and confide their unanswered-at-home questions with her. She also earns a sniveling teaching rival (Maya Holland of Happiest Season), a cheerleader co-worker in the crass lunch lady Barbara (In the Heights and Encanto’s Stephanie Beatriz), and a potential love interest in Alex (Trevor Salter, seen on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law), the dreamy P.E. teacher clad often in gray sweatpants.
LESSON #2: THERE IS A NEED FOR BETTER SEX EDUCATION— Underneath Maya’s central character arc of personal and professional trials and tribulations, Lilly Singh, in the writer’s chair with fellow screenwriter Neel Patel and director Sara Zandieh (The Other Zoey), uses Doin’ It’s substitute teacher predicament to put a spotlight on the clear need for better sex education curriculum. Going against the boss’s orders, Maya roots her new lessons in body positivity, empowered decision-making tools, and debunking taboos, many of which came from her own sterile upbringing, something that is not exclusive to Indian households. Doin’ It nails this message without missing a beat of entertainment.
Come to think of it, Doin’ It is a scaffold’s worth of sturdy platforms for both the issues at hand and the assembled talent. Branching out from its sex education core are frank sequences and conversations questioning personal shame, unlearning stigmas, calling out underlying racism, and strengthening support for more -isms than merely feminism. Zandieh and Singh lay all of it out with a hearty coat of R-rated language and hilariously filthy content. They veer in very messy directions and add up to preposterously wacky conclusions, but that’s the point. No one ordered the weak sauce, and there’s a great deal of confidence to appreciate about that bold approach.
LESSON #3: WATCH OUT FOR LILLY SINGH— Moreso, what’s refreshingly different about Doin’ It from the raunchy sex farces of a generation ago is that the unabashed gross-out humor done here comes from a chief pair of female gazes. Imagine any woman, influential or otherwise, getting this script and concept started and approved. As Sara Zandieh steers the misadventure competently and Casey Hudecki has her work cut out for her as the intimacy coordinator, this movie is—more than anything else—a very loud announcement of the multiple talents possessed by Lilly Singh. The keen ensemble’s dialogue crackles with her wit, her own voice leads a few songs on the kicking soundtrack, and the credits list her as the “Chief Officer of Vibes.” The camera rarely leaves her engaging presence. She is a force of nature and the reason Doin’ It lives up to its title.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1337)
from Review Blog https://everymoviehasalesson.com/blog/2025/9/movie-review-doin-it
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