Review of Dismissed (2017) by Tentative P — 27 Feb 2018

Cinematography was ok, but the shots were not very subtle (i.e. Teacher gets snubbed for his uni degree from Iowa State, comes home and stares doubtfully at his degree framed on the wall...There are a lot of shots like this.

) Dialogue was very cliche and sometimes awkwardly slow, especially between the teacher and his wife. The idea of Iago being a psychopath is nothing ground-breaking, but it was a somewhat interesting premise to have an Iago-like character in a modern setting.

However, there are more very unsubtle shots showing that the student is a psychopath, inducing a home video tape of him practicing emotions, "pretending to be human" even as a little kid. Yeah, we get it, psychopaths fake emotions to fit in with us "normal" humans but they still feel RAGE.

But doing this makes him an entirely unsympathetic, one-dimensional character. His father is also a very stupidly written character who could have been interesting (clearly knew the kid had problems but felt too defeated to combat it).

Actually, all of the characters are very unintelligent, which I guess had to happen for two of them to wind up dead thanks to that idiot Iago imposter who films a video with damning evidence and leaves the footage laying around unedited, clearly visible in the shot.

Anyway, if you just want to see Dylan Sprouse overact, watch this movie.