At some point in the last generation, parents who “just don’t understand” morphed into parents who need to be their kid’s best friend. In Kay Cannon’s Blockers, such helicopter parenting gets a hilarious send-up.

Despite an element of gross bodily fluid-laden gags, Blockers manages to be heartfelt and endearing – even if the film’s message is sometimes heavy handed.

Lisa (Leslie Mann), Mitchell (John Cena) and Hunter (Ike Barinholtz) drop their young daughters off at school and watch as their girls become best friends before their eyes. The trio decide to become best friends themselves but years later it’s really only the girls who have stayed friends, in their suburban slice of Chicago.

Lisa is a single mom whose bright Lily Pulitzer outfits hide a deep sense of loneliness and regret. Like many a mom, she looks as if she’s having fun to keep from crying. Mitchell turns out to be the most emotional one in the bunch, Cena playing the role with great enthusiasm. As the unofficial third wheel and resident troublemaker, Hunter is the lovable goof who loses his friends and his relationship with his daughter when he has an affair.

Divorces, a new baby and disappointments aside, the misfits reunite: to stop their daughters’ hidden plans to have sex on prom night. Nothing goes well for anyone.

The premise sets up many an emoji-related pun and awkward situation. Cannon, the director, leans in to cringeworthy vomit sequences and ball-grabbing jokes but she never loses sight of the movie’s central story. At heart, it’s still a film about parenting and growing up. The comedy feels organic, not a number of sequences connected by a paper-thin script. Cannon plays with the parents’ reasonable fear about their little girls growing up, producing very irrational – and comical – responses.

Each daughter has a chance to express her personality. They share traits with their parents, plus extra qualities that drive those parents crazy. Julie (Kathryn Newton) fulfills the role of the group’s preppy princess with perfectly styled blonde hair and a pink-drenched bedroom. Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan) takes after her dad, Mitchell, with an interest in sports and a high tolerance for drugs and alcohol. Hunter’s daughter, Sam (Gideon Adlon), looks like the nerd girl who shops at Hot Topic and crushes on a girl who likes to cosplay.

Although she’s a part of the group, Sam sometimes feels left out and unable to talk about her sex life in the way the other two do – a social awkwardness she shares with her dad.

Blockers is similar to Superbad, but made from the perspective of overprotective parents. The premise is ripe for spoofing and commenting about the latest parenting crazes and paranoia. The kids are relatively normal: unsure, insecure, trying to act older than they are. That sense of normalcy is echoed in the film’s setting and look.

It’s an idealized version of an upper-middle class life, now with interracial couples and parents with healthy sex lives. There’s nothing visually out of the ordinary in the film, aside from a prom scene with the most lighting I’ve ever seen at a school dance that wasn’t chaperoned by a church. For the most part, the film only lingers too long when the bodily fluids are flying. And do they ever fly.

However, Blockers suffers from stating its message too obviously and too many times. Yes, there’s a double standard facing girls who just want to have fun and lose their virginity. But the film broadcasts that mantra so ostentatiously that Blockers has to pause for characters to argue about whether it’s regressive to want to prevent their daughters from having sex.

These scenes can be funny, like when the grown-ups debate how much they should decipher their kids’ emoji sexting. They are less less funny when one of the mothers berates her husband for treating their child like “a damsel in distress”. Blockers telegraphs its intentions in big bold letters when it already has the audience laughing and probably nodding along.

Although the preaching for young women’s right to hook-up can feel intrusive, it doesn’t distract from the story entirely. There are so many personalities acting against each others’ wishes that the movie moves along quickly. And if you giggled at the poop-in-the-street scene from Bridesmaids or the peeing on the zipline moment from Girls Trip, you’ll probably get a good laugh from Blockers.

This film wants to have a good time with a positive feminist message. We can be silly, gross and foul-mouthed too. It took the industry long enough to notice that.