Review of Dazed and Confused (1993) by Diego T — 17 Feb 2014

There are a lot of movies that can be called "uneven," but the one that will forever come to mind for me is Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. That 2012 film had some great ideas, but was completely let down by bad plotting, hammy dialogue, and ludicrous plotting. When a movie has a great premise and fantastic elements to it, but is sloppily put together, it's one of the biggest tragedies in all of cinema. And so it is with Dazed and Confused, a 1993 film from Richard Linklater starring a bunch of people we don't know, plus Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck in minor roles. God, who cast this thing?

Dazed and Confused is, as you've probably heard, a movie about a bunch of high school students going out and getting high, and then getting drunk, and then smashing people's property, and then getting high again. The movie has been compared to American Graffiti as being another in the lineage of great period piece/high school movies, but frankly it doesn't hold a candle to George Lucas's classic (and only good) film. Whereas American Graffiti was an honest portrayal of what life was like in 1962, this movie fails entirely whenever it attempts to be authentic. Every line of dialogue sounds like it was written by someone's dad, trying to be hip and cool. "Hey, you wanna go smoke some dope?" Yuck. I think Greg Sestero's portrayal of a marijuana user was more accurate than this. Of course, I have no frame of reference here, as I was born in 1997 and have never touched a drug of any kind in my life. But it's still pretty hard to imagine people talking like this unless they're a bunch of modern-day kids putting on a production of Hair for their school, and doing a very poor job of imagining what life was like back in the day.

Some lines of dialogue are laugh-out-loud funny, but they're peppered among layers and layers of absolutely cringe-inducing lines that will make every audience member recoil in disgust. The characters also make random decisions that make no sense. For instance, Affleck and his gang decide to drive over to a middle school and pick on the soon-to-be-freshmen by spanking them with paddles they made in wood shop. Seems legit. Firstly, even in the days when kids beat each other up for lunch money, I find it hard to believe that this would actually happen. Secondly, the movie doesn't give Affleck a suitable enough comeuppance, thereby almost condoning his actions. Also, when he heads over to the school, he singles out a kid because the kid's older sister told Affleck not to pick on him. Which raises the obvious question: How does Affleck know what the kid looks like? Puh.

Overall, this movie has some good moments (seeing Mila Jovovich in her hippie days before she became a badass zombie killer is always interesting), but it always seems to try too hard to be a stoner classic. It feels like another big studio wanted to cash in on cult movies, tried to make this thing to appeal to the stoner crowd, but forgot to add in any quirky humor or good characters for us to care about. Even the title, Dazed and Confused, is generic and doesn't allude much to the actual content of the film, and the poster (featuring a stoned smiley-face) is a cliched cop-out and a way for the movie to avoid doing anything even remotely original. At the end of the day, it's just a patchwork of other, better films that never quite coheres into the cult classic it so desperately wants to be. Instead of being funny, it's lame. Instead of being fresh, it's been seen a thousand times before. And instead of being authentic, it accidentally captures the 1960s far better than the 1970s, and even then only displays the misogynistic, neanderthal-like members of society. Only one thought can possibly run through the viewer's mind: Who the hell cares about these people?

Final Score for Dazed and Confused: 4/10 stars. This movie has some truly great parts, and some quotable lines that I'm sure you've heard before in YouTube videos, but past that it's not really worth much. Everything in this movie is a stereotype, there is virtually no plot, and the little fun that could have been had watching the character's antics is undercut by the fact that none of the proceedings are actually very funny. Even if some moments ring true, you'll be sitting dazed and confused for most of its run time instead of happy and entertained.