This Is a Movie Review: Sharks Are Only Problem in ’47 Meters Down’

June 16, 2017

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This review was originally posted on News Cult in June 2017.

Starring: Mandy Moore, Claire Holt, Matthew Modine

Director: Johannes Roberts

Running Time: 85 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Getting the Ocean All Messy with Human Blood

Release Date: June 16, 2017

The premise of 47 Meters Down – two cage diving sisters must escape shark-infested water after falling to the ocean floor – sounds exactly like that of last year’s The Shallows, except underwater instead of on a rock. There is certainly enough room on the big screen for multiple bloodthirsty chompers. Jaws is the granddaddy that they must all bow down to, but some of its imitators have actually bit nearly as hard. But could it be possible to have two good ones in a row, released almost exactly one year apart, and so similar in their particulars (tightly contained single location, young female protagonists, Mexican resort setting)?

It turns out that even though 47 Meters Down has several sharks to The Shallows’ one, it is more about the terror of claustrophobia. With Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate’s (Claire Holt) oxygen tanks quickly running out, the threat of drowning is much more urgent. If you are easily disoriented, it would be wise to skip this one. The cinematography is only as coherent as necessary to illustrate how dire the girls’ situation is. The rest is a blur of pitch black and bubbles. Sure, the sharks do not make this any easier to bear, but the predicament would be plenty overwhelming without them.

This variety of horror can almost skate by on economy of premise, but a strong central performance is also essential. As the resident competent amateur, Holt plays her part straightforwardly. But the bigger narrative burden falls to Moore, who is notably miscast. To be fair, though, the role as written would be difficult for just about anyone to play. It mostly requires her to be hysterically crying over a life-risking predicament she never wanted to participate in in the first place. There is a reason why the best of this genre usually features the protagonists attempting (and usually succeeding) to do what they never thought possible.

47 Meters Down wins me over, at least partially, with its ending that feels ambiguous though it is not really ambiguous; it is clear what has happened, though it is inconclusive what the message is. This conclusion takes a few risks, but it also walks back on some of them. It is edgy, bittersweet, strange, and disorienting, but probably a bit more disorienting than it means to be.

47 Meters Down is Recommended If You Like: The Shallows, Facing Your Own Claustrophobia

Grade: 3 out of 5 Bends

This Is a Movie Review: ‘The Mummy’ Reboot is Lifeless Except for the Rare Moments When It Embraces Its Goofy Side

June 9, 2017

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This review was originally posted on News Cult in June 2017.

Starring: Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, Russell Crowe

Director: Alex Kurtzman

Running Time: 110 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Getting Ur Freak On with Death

Release Date: June 9, 2017

I laughed derisively when the Universal globe logo spun around and gave way to the “Dark Universe” logo, but the joke was on me, as the best parts of this new interlocking cinematic franchise are the ones setting up its upcoming entries. More fundamentally, the reason the joke was on me was because I held out hope throughout The Mummy that something unique or especially thrilling might happen.

As far as reboots go, once again resurrecting the Egyptian tomb-dwellers is far from an outrage. This undead crew is part of the cinematic and larger cultural collective unconscious, so there is plenty of room for new generations of storytellers to add their spin. But this particular version of The Mummy is maddening because it never establishes a convincing reason for why it should exist in the first place.

There is a fairly clean setup in which the Ancient Egyptian Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) makes a deal with Set, the god of Death, but then is defeated and laid to rest thousands of years to become the title villain. Then Tom Cruise swoops in as low-rent Indiana Jones Nick Morton and slips open her tomb, thus unleashing the Pandora’s box of the Dark Universe. So far, so reasonable. But then the story gets bogged down in mythical mumbo-jumbo about daggers and prophecies and whatever. Universal so obviously wants to copy the success of Marvel, but it is not going to do that by following its worst habit of focusing way too much on the MacGuffins. Are there mythological nerds out there who actually care about this minutiae?

All this plot-centric gobbledygook can be forgiven if The Mummy can provide the genre thrills, but the results in that department are mostly meh. Cruise is as game as always, but the action, while competently shot and coherently edited, is not especially memorable. The one mildly saving grace comes from the stabs at horror. Boutuella’s snake-like body and shadowy face provide a canvas for some decently scary images, as her pupils split into two pairs and her corpse decomposes into a dusty pile of bones (reminiscent of the effects of drinking from the wrong grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).

Alas, that is all inconsequential, because the real purpose of The Mummy is prologue to a series of tales in which Dr. Jekyll is the de facto Nick Fury. Russell Crowe plays the good doctor with a motivation apparently split between defeating monsters or assembling them. That dichotomy is potentially interesting and fits the character, but it is a distraction from the actual movie it is in.

At the beginning of this review, I said that I was somehow excited for the rest of the Dark Universe, but mulling everything over, I should probably temper my anticipation, though I still hold out a smidgen hope. The Mummy’s conclusion indicates that the next entries might actually kick back and have more fun by giving extra screen time to characters like Morton’s partner Chris Vail, brought to screeching, howling life by Jake Johnson (New Girl fans will be confused every time he calls Cruise “Nick”). For its lead character, The Mummy could have really used with more off-kilter energy. Cruise can be edgy, but he is too straightforward to match the hysterical, almost Abbott and Costello-esque vibe that Johnson employs to intermittently resuscitate this DOA franchise to life.

The Mummy is Recommended If You Like: Tom Cruise-related schadenfreude, Jake Johnson (though you must be able to endure long stretches without him)

Grade: 2 out of 5 Decompositions

This Is a Movie Review: The Partnership Between ‘Megan Leavey’ and Bomb-Sniffing Rex is One for the Ages, Elevating an Otherwise Ho-Hum Biopic

June 7, 2017

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This review was originally posted on News Cult in June 2017.

Starring: Kate Mara, Edie Falco, Ramón Rodríguez, Common, Tom Felton, Bradley Whitford

Director: Gabriela Cowperthwaite

Running Time: 116 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Medium-Grade Explosives Injuries

Release Date: June 9, 2017

There is plenty of research and apocryphal evidence suggesting that dogs experience genuine emotions and form interspecies bonds much the same way that humans do. This always comes with the caveat that we can never exactly know the accuracy of those conclusions, as none of us has ever literally been inside a dog’s head. Most of the research I have encountered has included little, if any, reference to military bomb-sniffing dogs, which is a bit of a lost opportunity as that high pressure occupation surely has a noteworthy effect on the canine psyche. But at least now we can examine the compelling evidence of Marine Corporal Megan Leavey and her dog Rex.

Megan Leavey is a fairly straightforward military story, but it distinguishes itself with its high-class casting and its crew of sniffers. Kate Mara is sufficiently lived-in as the title character, imbuing actual personality into voiceover about how she needs to escape her boring New York town. As her parents, Edie Falco and Bradley Whitford do as much as they can with underwritten, limited screen time. And a fellow soldier (Ramón Rodríguez) strikes up decently sizzling chemistry with Leavey, despite the extent of their attraction consisting of an opposites attract thing where she’s a Yankees fan, and he’s a Mets fan.

But forget about the humans, we’re here to talk about Rex! We can also discuss Megan a little, so long as she bonds sufficiently with Rex. Obviously, she does, given the film’s whole premise. The two save a lot of lives in their bomb detection efforts and in the process grow as close as any human and dog experiencing intense stress together could.

After retiring from the service, Leavey fights through bureaucracy all the way to the U.S. Senate to change Rex’s “unadoptable” classification. It is not hard to get the audience on your side in such a mission, but it can be challenging to avoid schmaltz. This film makes you tear up, but it also earns your respect. Megan enters therapy to deal with her PTSD and her grief over missing Rex, and both ailments are treated with the dignity that they deserve. Their ultimate reunion is affecting not just because it is always adorable to cuddle a dog, but because Mara thoroughly convinces us that Leavey really did learn how to love from Rex.

Megan Leavey is Recommended If You Like: The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, Homeward Bound

Grade: 3 out of 5 Good Boys

 

This is a Movie Review: Of Course Sam Elliott is ‘The Hero’ We Need Now and Forever

June 6, 2017

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This review was originally posted on News Cult in June 2017.

Starring: Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon, Nick Offerman, Krysten Ritter, Katharine Ross

Director: Brett Haley

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Rating: R for Never Being Too Old for Drugs and Sex

Release Date: June 9, 2017 (Limited)

If you hear the logline “legendary cowboy actor who gets confused when an awards show clip featuring him goes viral” and do not immediately cast Sam Elliott, well then, I am glad you are not one of the people who made The Hero. The role of Western icon Lee Hayden is as tailor made for the famously drawling, silver-mustachioed Elliott as any role as ever been for anyone. He might not be as confused by modern media or as melancholy as his character is, but I do not know all the details of his personal life, and we all have our moments.

In the midst of Lee’s renewed burst of notoriety, he spends his days smoking weed with his buddy/dealer (Nick Offerman), attempting to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Krysten Ritter), and striking up some sort of an affair with a stand-up comedian a few decades younger than him (Laura Prepon). It is the latter relationship that gets the most narrative weight. May-December romances with big shot men can be a formula for a ton of tired creepiness, but Prepon holds her own in terms of self-assuredness and Elliott plays Lee as ambivalent as any viewer might be. What we see of Prepon’s stand-up is much more questionable.

All that this type of singularly focused character study requires to work are a compelling central performance and at least one resonant idea. We have already established that the former is met (it would be a shock if it weren’t). As for the latter, Lee utters the line, “Movies are other people’s dreams,” and this acts as the driving principle for much of the film. A series of dream sequences feature him at the edge of the ocean, waves lightly breaking in. Nothing much happens, but the mundanity is transcended by the beauty of simply living.

The Hero is Recommended If You Like: Being a Sam Elliott Fanboy

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Weed Strains

 

This Is a Movie Review: With ‘Beatriz at Dinner,’ Salma Hayek Ain’t Taking No Guff From Racist John Lithgow

June 6, 2017

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This review was originally published on News Cult in June 2017.

Starring: Salma Hayek, John Lithgow, Connie Britton, David Warshofsky, Chloë Sevigny, Jay Duplass, Amy Landecker, John Early

Director: Miguel Arteta

Running Time: 83 Minutes

Rating: R for Verbal Knifeplay

Release Date: June 9, 2017 (Limited)

What would you do if you have had a chance encounter with the person who represents all that you oppose? I imagine that many people would feel quite strongly when responding to this question but also that it would produce a number of disparate, potentially conflicting answers. Beatriz at Dinner, the latest collaboration from the Chuck & Buck team of writer Mike White (School of Rock, HBO’s Enlightened) and director Miguel Arteta (Youth in Revolt, Cedar Rapids), fundamentally understands this tension, with conviction in its ideals and uncertainty about how to live by them.

Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a goat-owning masseuse/healer who makes a house call to her wealthy client Cathy (Connie Britton). When her car breaks down, she finds herself stuck at Cathy and her husband’s Grant’s (David Warshofsky) fancy dinner party. Cathy is happy to have Beatriz there, as she considers her family ever since she helped her daughter through cancer treatment. But Beatriz is culturally light years away from client’s friends and colleagues. Chloë Sevigny, Jay Duplass, and Amy Landecker are right in their cluelessly arrogant upper class wheelhouses. (Sample dialogue: “I love psychic stuff.”) And then there is real estate mogul Doug Strutt, brought to gloriously, hideously racist life by John Lithgow.

Comparisons between Strutt and a certain current world leader are inevitable, among perhaps both his detractors and his supporters. But it is worth noting that Lithgow’s performance is as far as can be from crudity, in terms of style if not so much substance. His default presence makes him a natural at playing oddly trustworthy authority figures. He has a hint of eccentricity – not so much that he ought to be dismissed, but just enough that he is allowed to get away with it. That reputation is ripe for subversion, as in the NBC sitcom Trial & Error, where his eccentricity verges on bumbling idiocy, or here, where it is a cover for plain evil.

While Lithgow’s performance is impressive in the most expected ways, Hayek’s is fascinating for how surprisingly, and occasionally even bafflingly, Beatriz behaves. But there are not really any logical inconsistencies here, as there is no blueprint for how to act in this situation. Beatriz believes that she recognizes Strutt as the developer who destroyed her Mexican community, and so she viciously chews him in front of the whole party. In this game of chess, she may have sacrificed her queen too early, but perhaps it is all part of her strategy. She bobs and weaves, offering up apologies, or feigning them, or mixing legitimate apologies in with lip service. In the meantime, she gathers up evidence to potentially prove Strutt’s misdeeds. But to what end? This is a man who boasts of skirting, or even running roughshod over, the law.

Responding to this moral vacuum requires counterintuitive behavior, which inspires a career-best performance from Hayek but puts the film on shaky narrative ground. The story ultimately becomes just as untethered as Beatriz, and accordingly it cannot really figure out how to conclude. Should it go in for the kill and ramp up the intensity, or should it settle for the moral victory? It offers up both versions, which is a little frustrating, but the straightforward viciousness is fun while it lasts.

Beatriz at Dinner is Recommended If You Like: Enlightened, Evil John Lithgow, Clapping Back

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Aperitifs for Destruction

This Is a Movie Review: ‘It Comes at Night’ Isn’t Just About Paranoia, It IS Paranoia

June 5, 2017

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This review was originally published on News Cult in June 2017.

Starring: Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Christopher Abbott, Riley Keough, Kelvin Harrison Jr.

Director: Trey Edward Shults

Running Time: 91 Minutes

Rating: R for Frequent Bouts of Vomiting Blood

Release Date: June 9, 2017

A common rule of thumb in horror is that which remains unseen makes for the scariest monsters. What if this guideline were stretched to its furthest limit? Could a total lack of evidence – the unseen itself as a concept – be the ultimate horror? The paranoia-fueled It Comes at Night makes a strong case for just that.

While the titular “It” remains beyond anyone’s perception, its effects are clear and visible right from the get-go. The film opens in a cabin in the woods, that staple of horror film settings, stripped down to its bare essentials. Paul (Joel Edgerton) and Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) live with their teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) in a most desolate location. Their first order of business is disposing of Sarah’s father Bud (David Pendleton), who has succumbed to some sort of deadly contagion that appears to be looming as a threat over the entire world. How far from society has this family removed itself? Or has civilization broken down entirely such that there is no society to detach from? How far into the future does this take place, or is this present day? Does time even matter?

All this uncertainty ensures that no happy ending can come out of someone breaking into Paul and Sarah’s thoroughly boarded-up home. Will (Christopher Abbott), the intruder, somehow manages to get an invitation out of Paul to join them in the house, along with his wife Kim (Riley Keough), and their young son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), but it is an uneasy peace. The two families divvy up their supplies evenly, but the issue here is not fairness, it is trust, which is impossible to establish. The specter of death in these woods is ever-present but also unknowable – anyone could be its agent, even without intending to be. A simple changing of one’s mind is cause for confrontation.

At the risk of giving too much away, I think it is important to note that It Comes at Night might not exactly be the film that its advertising makes it out to be. This is a major issue at a time when horror hounds expect visceral thrills out of something low-key like It Follows or they anticipate comprehensibility out of something inscrutable like The Witch. It Comes’ trailers give the sense that there is some monster lurking in the woods that is the source of the disease. That might be true, but that is also beside the point. It could also be a government experiment gone wrong, or it could be a nameless, faceless apocalypse-level pandemic. But the prime monster in this slice of the world is paranoia. When the structure of one’s reality breaks apart irreversibly, there is no such thing as security or sanity.

It Comes at Night is Recommended If You Like: The Thing, The Others, The Blair Witch Project

Grade: 4 out of 5 Infections

This Is a Movie Review: ‘3 Idiotas’ Scramble for Academic Glory in This Mexican Remake of a Bollywood Blockbuster

June 1, 2017

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This review was originally posted on News Cult in June 2017.

Starring: Alfonso Dosal, Martha Higareda, Germán Valdés III, Christian Vázquez, Vadhir Derbez, Rodrigo Murray

Director: Carlos Bolado

Running Time: 106 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Fairly Painful, Occasionally Crude Physical Comedy

Release Date: June 2, 2017

The Mexican comedy 3 Idiotas makes the case that Hollywood clichés about higher education translate easily south of the border and that those same clichés can still be entertaining when delivered by spirited performances. Based on 3 Idiots, one of the highest-grossing Indian films of all time, Idiotas (the third of at least six remakes, including a planned American version) follows titular knuckleheads Pancho (Alfonso Dosal, a dead ringer for Rami Malek), Beto (Germán Valdés III), and Felipe (Christian Vázquez) as they work their way to an engineering degree. They are branded as fools not because of a lack of academic acumen (for the most part) but because of their tendency to run afoul of authority, particularly blowhard professor Esaclona (Rodrigo Murray).

Felipe is the first in his family to make it to college, Beto would rather be a photographer; these two get sufficient resolutions, but this is mostly Pancho’s story. Their college exploits are presented through a frame story, in which Felipe and Beto recount their earlier days while tracking down Pancho, who disappeared on the cusp of graduation. Pancho is one of the university’s most promising students, and his budding romance with med student Mariana is obviously headed for a happy ending, even though he ruins her sister’s wedding and his dad is the aforementioned Escalona. There are some rom-com detours into over-the-top complications, which are a bit frustrating, but they are not a dealbreaker when the crux of the story is the mix of coming-of-age maturation and aspirational academia.

Essentially, 3 Idiotas’ purpose is a combination of standing up to authority, inspiring its characters and viewers to invent new products, and scatology. That sounds like a ridiculous menu, but somehow it left me delighted throughout. As Escalona, Murray is fully committed to the power-hungry academic role that is the bane of many a cinematic free-thinker. His is an exaggerated stereotype, but he wears it well. The inspirational angle feels shoehorned in out of necessity; it is too vague to produce real results, but at least it is plenty earnest. And then there are the farts. So many farts. One character is branded with the nickname “Stinky McToilet.” Maybe that moniker lost some dignity in translation from Spanish to English, but quite frankly, I hope not.

And because this is a remake of an Indian film, there is Bollywood-style closing credits dance extravaganza. It pretty much comes out of nowhere, but how can you ever say no to the rhythm?

3 Idiotas is Recommended If You Like: Dead Poets Society, Easy A, Nacho Libre (for the farts)

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Scorched Scrotums

 

This Is a Movie Review: Indie Rom-Coms Continue Chugging Along with Demetri Martin’s ‘Dean’

May 31, 2017

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This review was originally posted on News Cult in May 2017.

Starring: Demetri Martin, Kevin Kline, Gillian Jacobs, Rory Scovel, Mary Steenburgen

Director: Demetri Martin

Running Time: 87 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for A Little Bit of Language, A Little Bit of Relations

Release Date: June 2, 2017 (Limited)

If you look at Demetri Martin – the moptopped, artistically inclined comedian whose Wikipedia page once listed Socrates as an influence – and think “romantic comedy lead,” then chances are that you and I would get along famously. And wouldn’t you know it, we now have the perfect topic to discuss: Dean, a minor-key charmer serving as Martin’s directorial debut.

Martin plays the title character, a Brooklyn illustrator living through with the fallout of his mother’s death and a breakup with his ex-fiancée (Christine Woods). Instead of dealing with all that, he flies out to Los Angeles to meet with an ad agency interested in using his drawings. Alas, the pitch and the hipster-bro vibe put him off. (SNL’s Beck Bennett is perfect as the exec who remains on his office treadmill the entire scene.) At this point, Dean really should head back home and sort out matters with his father (Kevin Kline), who is eager to sell their house. But he finds himself too entranced by La La Land to head home, because he meets this girl named Nicky, and she is played by Gillian Jacobs, a Pittsburgh native who often inhabits West Coast gals who inadvertently knock the lead characters out of their stupors and makes it look effortless (it’s not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing, it’s a chill vibe thing).

Spoiler alert: this budding romance does not exactly end happily. But that does not mean there is no satisfying resolution to be had. The reason the title is Dean as opposed to “Dean & Nicky” or “Millennial Love Story” is because it is about the individual. (Dad, also gets his own storyline, a suitably engaging romance with his realtor, played by Mary Steenburgen.) There are plenty of stories about looking for love and growing up, and this one is hardly groundbreaking. But they keep being told because new storytellers keep creeping towards their thirties and forties. What we as viewers humbly request of them along the way is that they find honesty and individuality in their voice. And in the guise of Dean, I am happy to hear from Demetri Martin has to say.

Dean is Recommended If You Like: Demetri Martin’s illustrations, (500) Days of Summer, Celeste and Jesse Forever

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Pubic Clown Wigs

This Is a Movie Review: ‘Baywatch’ is Gratuitous, Shameless, and in Search of a Purpose

May 25, 2017

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CREDIT: Frank Masi/Paramount Pictures

This review was originally posted on News Cult in May 2017.

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron, Alexandra Daddario, Priyanka Chopra, Kelly Rohrbach, Jon Bass, Ilfenesh Hadera, Rob Huebel, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II

Director: Seth Gordon

Running Time: 119 Minutes

Rating: R for An Obsession with All Body Parts

Release Date: May 25, 2017

Baywatch follows the 21 Jump Street template: take a TV show from a couple decades ago that people remember but nobody is especially attached to, then blow it out to something bigger, brasher, and maybe a little meta. It may not be the most ambitious formula, but Jump Street proved that it could result in a clever commentary on the nature of reboots. Baywatch is less interested in that, or any pretensions. Instead, it mostly wants to just hang out and do its own thing. Which is fine! The film makes a go at capturing the cheeky spirit of the original on a larger, less discreet scale – it might leave you feeling a little naughty, but everyone is indulging. Alas, it ultimately descends into just the latest gross-out comedy crossed with a derivative action spectacular.

The most representative shot of Baywatch of Kelly Rohrbach’s jiggling butt while she administers the Heimlich maneuver. Rohrbach is C.J., the bubbly blond bombshell filling in for Pamela Anderson, and the choking victim is Ronnie (Jon Bass), the chubby trainee who is inexplicably recruited to the lifeguard crew. This odd couple obviously ends up together, even though Ronnie is sure C.J. is out of his league, but she knows what she wants and she does not even need to the dance moves that Ronnie learned at Hebrew school to be won over. The schlubby guy/hot girl pairing might be cliché, but the specific details in this case are actually kind of encouraging. There is something inspiring about how the guy who gets his privates stuck between the slats of a beach chair is more Casanova than laughingstock. Everyone loves Ronnie!

In fact, the great charm about Baywatch is how well everyone on the team gets along. The other major romance, between trainees Brody (Zac Efron) and Summer (Alexandra Daddario), at first appears like it will be distressingly conflict-driven but instead evolves into a much more palatable game of playful one-upmanship. Really the only conflict of any significance is the one between head honcho Mitch (Dwayne Johnson, taking over for the Hoff) and Brody. The latter is a gold-medal winning Olympic swimmer looking to repair his image after a Ryan Lochte-esque scandal, and he is only on the team because Baywatch administration wants to boost its p.r. Naturally, Mitch must teach this lone wolf the importance of teamwork. But even here, the dynamic is sympathetic and silly, with Mitch letting the homeless Brody crash at his place and pranking him with a corpse’s genitals.

The majority of this review sounds rather complimentary, even though only about 25% of the film is worth recommending. But it is that 25% about which I have the most to say. Theoretically, Baywatch could be perfectly enjoyable if it were just a plotless hangout movie, with the lifeguards saving civilians by day and porking each other by night. Instead, there must be a standard-issue action plot about a Bond-type villainess (Priyanka Chopra) with the entire town in her pocket pulling off a drug-smuggling ring. The Baywatch crew takes it upon themselves to investigate the mysterious substances and dead bodies washing up on their shores, but since they are not law enforcement, they have no authority to do so, which the actual police keeps reminding them about

Indeed, they are not law enforcement. Nor are they superheroes, which this film so desperately wants them to be. They are mortal human beings who may be highly skilled at what they do, but there is no compelling reason to believe that they can be ominously superhuman saviors. It takes the absurd stake-raising of multiple sequels to get to that point. Viewers for this style of popcorn fare are like that metaphorical frog sitting in gradually boiling water. If the stakes go up bit by bit, we do not realize until after the fact that we have forever departed any semblance of reality. But if they are jacked up to 11 right from the start, we rightfully scoff.

Baywatch is Recommended If You Like: Tight Bodies and Explosions

Grade: 2 out of 5 Slo-Mo Bouncing Breasts

This Is a Movie Review: Stuck in a Teenage Girl’s Bedroom, ‘Everything, Everything’ Has a Teenage Heart and Soul

May 18, 2017

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This review was originally published on News Cult in May 2017.

Starring: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, Ana de la Reguera, Morgan Saylor

Director: Stella Meghie

Running Time: 96 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Artfully Shot Sickness and Tastefully Shot Teen Sensuality

Release Date: May 19, 2017

Everything, Everything is a teen romance fantasy in a vacuum. The good and bad thing about vacuums is that they keep everything out – in this case, both the distractions that can get in the way of a genuine connection but also the context and experiences that deepen that connection.

18-year-old Maddy Whittier (Amandla Stenberg) has been housebound nearly her entire life, due to her Severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), a disorder that leaves her deathly vulnerable to all the infections of the outside world. She has managed to carve out a decently satisfying routine in her domestic prison: writing mini reviews of all the books she reads, assembling dioramas of the places she cannot visit, and having game/movie nights with her mom (phonetic Scrabble and Moonstruck are a couple of favorites). But when prototypically cute boy with a hardscrabble home life Olly (Nick Robinson) moves in next door, her desire to break free can no longer be so easily contained.

This is the type of movie in which a character 100% earnestly says, “I loved you before I knew you” (to which the response in real life should always be, “That is not how love works”). But when it comes to the outsize emotions of adolescence, such a sentiment is understandable and can often make for thrilling stories about first love. Everything, Everything wants to be that type of story, and the physical entrapment in its premise is a potent formula for a big tension release, but the trouble is, the chemistry between Stenberg and Robinson is supposed to be self-evident, but in fact it never really clicks.

The lack of passion is a shame, because the design around the lovers is striking. Their conversations are mostly through text or online messaging, but they are sometimes presented as taking place in life-size versions of Maddy’s dioramas – a lovingly designed diner or library occupied just by them, but in which they dance around each other’s orbit, never really in the same spot, representing both the effort to protect Maddy and their emotional distance. When the two are finally allowed to meet in person, their dialogue is accompanied by subtitles representing their inner thoughts (a la Annie Hall), which is insightful enough to make up for the lack of chemistry, but alas that technique lasts only that one scene.

Eventually Maddy decides that she simply must take the risk of leaving home, which ultimately leads to an alarming twist that re-contextualizes the entire film. Suddenly, Everything, Everything is filled with so much more depth than it has been letting on, but there is not enough running time left to fully grapple with all of the implications of this reveal. What at first appears to be (and in fact largely is) a shamelessly mushy love story transforms into an examination of grief and the lengths that people go to protect themselves. These are two sides of a coin that could very well complement each other, but it is hard to be satisfying when one is so much more heavily weighted than the other.

Everything, Everything is Recommended If You Like: The Space Between Us, The music of Ludwig Göransson

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Astronauts

 

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