Critical Reception
| Professional ratings |
| Review scores |
| Source |
Rating |
| Allmusic |
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The genius of the "High School Musical" machine becomes more apparent in its third installment—the first for the big screen. As seniors Troy (Zac Efron), Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) and Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) graduate from fictitious East High, they also leave the franchise and attempt to repackage themselves as mainstream pop stars with wider demographic appeal. Meanwhile, new faces like British exchange student Tiara (Jemma McKenzie-Brown) start to sing and dance their way into the hearts of the faithful. The infinitely refreshable series has its musical formula down: Take "Rent"-style modern Broadway, add a kid-friendly dance beat with allusions to current pop, remove all hints of angst or lust. The result is another utopian vision of American teens, made for preteens. But the cast attacks the material with such sell-it-to-the-back-row spunk that anyone who likes a good show can't help but get a kick out of it.
—Billboard Magazine,
Lost in the shuffle of the ever-growing High School Musical phenomenon -- growing so big, it can no longer be contained on the Disney Channel, it's now reaching theaters for its third and final installment -- is that the tween-sensation is actually a musical. Which means that despite its pop trappings, the soundtracks consist of full-blown show tunes, songs that serve the story and are sung by the rotating cast. This helps make the movies work, but it sentences the soundtracks to be mere souvenirs of the event, a record for fans to play endlessly, not a means to crossover to a wider pop audience. On HSM3, there are only two songs that stand out as potential pop singles, both not so coincidentally solo showcases for the franchise's two biggest stars, Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron. Hudgens has the album's best song in the slickly soulful "Walk Away" -- a tune that would have shown up Wilson Phillips circa 1990 -- that she sings better than Efron, whose "Scream" struts like *NSYNC circa 2000. But both are upstaged by stage brat Ashley Tisdale, who shows far more on-record charisma on her fame-hungry showcase "I Want It All," a song that has absolutely no chance of making sense outside of the senior skip-day plot line of High School Musical 3, but Tisdale performs with ingratiating vigor, using every chop she's learned as a stage kid. Of course, those very strengths are well-suited for a musical like High School Musical 3, where the songs are vehicles for showboating performances either on the screen or in a fan's bedroom -- and for those fans, this set, which is similar in every way to its two predecessors, will not disappoint.
—Allmusic,