Review of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) by Movie M — 26 Aug 2017

"Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" had some potential, but never did anything to get me intrigued. The biggest problem with it was that the entire movie felt like one extremely long ending.

The movie is centred around Billy (Joe Alwyn), and his experiences as a soldier, with bits here and there expressing people's disregard for how truly traumatic life on the battlefield can be. However, we are only showed glimpses through the war through flashbacks, and the entire rest of the movie is basically about nothing.

There's a bit about Billy's conflict with his sister, Kathryn (Kristen Stewart), who doesn't want him to go to war, a movie that some agent Albert (Chris Tucker) wants to make, and Billy meeting a girl, Faison (Makenzie Leigh), who's literally useless to the movie besides having a love interest for Billy.

All of that is the movie, and I don't know they expect us to actually get engaged and attracted to the plot with something as bland and as branched out as that. There is no main plot to this movie, and the only interesting scenes were the brief flashbacks, and the scenes with Vin Diesel (Shroom), even though he was barely in the movie.

A lot of the movie is also about how Bravo Squad is so close, they're basically brothers, however we barely get to see their experiences together, and the movie did such a terrible job of showing us the experiences that they went through together, so that made the chemistry between the soldiers a lot more unconvincing.

In the end, "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" felt like the entire front half of the movie was missing, and was just one long conclusion, and although the flashback scenes and some other elements peaked my interest, "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" is definitely not worth watching.