Review of December Boys (2007) by Josh G — 15 Mar 2008

****PROBABLY SPOILERS****.

This is a really bad movie.

We open with a shot of kids in line at an orphanage with parents coming to choose the child they want using the eeny meeny miney mo method. Is this really how orphanages work?

Come to find out, four of the kids are The December Boys. Sound like super-heros don't they? They're really only called that because their birthdays are in December. Also, they're best friends because of that. Also, the 'December Boys' moniker is only used like twice in the film and honestly has no real importance at all. The 'December Boys' are Maps, Spit, Sparks, and Misty: nicknames that are also very significant, e.g. "My name's Spit because I can spit.".

The boys are sent to some fake sea-side town where only five people live, and they hang out there for a while. The boys fall in love with a motorcycle guy and spend an entire day driving up and down the beach while sitting on his shoulders. The next scene has them sitting on the porch looking dejected, and upon hearing some people laughing, one of them says, "At least somebody's having fun." You just spent an entire day driving back and forth on a motorcycle! What else do you want?!? The boys become divided because one of them may or may not be adopted by said motorcycle dude. What this means for the movie is that the boys are inexplicably friendly toward one another or spiteful in different scenes, with no particular reason for it.

There's a subplot involving a giant fish which ultimately goes nowhere. And similarly, there's a horse that keeps appearing for no reason.

There's also a subplot about Daniel Radcliffe meeting some slutty girl on the beach and going into a cave so he can touch her boob. Radcliffe, by the way, gives a pretty lackluster performance in this movie and I think that the boob-touch was what made him sign on to this film. Again, the subplot with the girl doesn't really go anywhere, either.

The movie as a whole doesn't go anywhere.

Q: Do the characters grow, do they change?

A: I don't know. There's no continuity at all.

Q: Do they come to some sort of revelation?

A: I don't know, maybe some sort of religious one?

There's a scene in particular that demonstrates everything bad about the movie in like a minute and a half. It goes like this:

Misty sees something over the ridge and the other boys follow him to look. Shots of a black horse running around in the sand. They look over the ridge and there's a topless woman running in the surf. In the VERY NEXT SHOT, the boys are walking near the water and a now fully-clothed woman (I'm assuming that it's the same woman) says something like, "We've been waiting for you." Then she begins rubbing sunscreen on their faces. Misty is having some sort of religious experience here, which is signified by close-ups on him pushing his glasses up and brushing flies away from his face in slow-motion -- like three times. What the hell is this movie trying to accomplish?

And seriously, I know that this probably isn't a fair criticism, but what was with all the flies? Couldn't they have added a line: "Sure are an awful lot of flies around here." Or something. You know, instead of just having every actor continuously brushing flies off of their faces and pretending like there's nothing wrong.