97% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 204 reviews)
Runtime: 113 long minutes
Directed by: Edgar Wright
Starring: Ansel Elgort and all those people you saw in the trailers
From: Several film studios
I wish I could love this movie like most of the rest of the world did. Much to my dismay, it fell pretty flat for me, despite some quality elements. I try to explain my dissenting opinion below:
I realize there will be many people disappointed by how I rated this; believe me, there is no one more disappointed than me that as a whole I did not really like the film. I'll try to explain why without giving away too much or writing a doctoral thesis.
The entire thing felt incredibly forced to me, as if they were trying WAY too hard to be “cool”. It was unnatural and more annoying than anything else. Talk about “style over substance”, which I am not always a fan of, especially when it is constantly smacked in your face. Speaking of annoying, when you can't stand the title character and are never able to warm up to him... Baby is a walking nervous tic, a living embodiment of “quirk”, and I thought he was an annoying hipster asshat who does a bunch of weird s*** and has an old Lincoln as a daily driver just because and he does some things in the film I could not understand at all; character motivations in general was another problem I had, especially in the final act. But back to Baby... he is clumsy while walking, just because; I did not laugh when it happened the first time; I certainly did not laugh the 15th time it happened. Then there's such things as the identity of Baby's adopted father... there's a great example of forcing something in order to be “hip”. I did not care about his plight, like at all.
Sadly, early on I realized this movie wasn't for me, with Baby and none of the other characters being enjoyable or fun to hang around. Baby's prospective love interest (Debora), you hardly get to know anything about her, so why should I care about the relationship between her and some socially awkward goofball who had a potato in his pants when she was around!? Sure, the movie has an awesome soundtrack filled with cool songs-not all of them I knew beforehand-and there were some very exciting moments, but otherwise this fell flat for me. The moments that were highs were enough to make me say that this was average; when you were expecting far better... and at times I wish some things would have been shot differently, although other things were shot quite well.
I can't fault the cast as they did well with the material they were given. The “constant music” thing started to get old after awhile, even with the great soundtrack filled with tunes right up my alley (and it being a fact that some people use music to try and drown out their tinnitus). While I did note some things I did enjoy, there was far more that annoyed me. There being about 6 different endings did not help either. Overall, I am glad most people love this movie to death and it is nice it is not another damn superhero film (although it is a pastiche of various 70's and early 80's movies, which I'd rather watch or watch again as those typically don't try so damn hard to be “awesome”, some of them just are awesome), but this was still filled with cliché and this motion picture regrettably did not work for me.
If I tried really hard I imagine I could ramble on and in more depth about the problems I had with this, but I'll try to forget about this except for some new choice songs I learned about... and the loveliness of Eiza Gonzalez. It's nice more people now know about such acts as The Incredible Bongo Band, The Detroit Emeralds, and Bob & Earl-the original singers of The Harlem Shuffle-but as I already knew about them...
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