Review of Don't Think Twice (2016) by Bananafish — 05 Aug 2016

Usually reviewers come online to rant or rave, and I wish to do neither as I felt it was truly just "OK". However, I must ask -w here are these stellar reviews coming from? Did they see a different movie? This was the Citizen Kane of dramady about improv comedians?

Look, I like Brigbiglia and Glass a lot (have been fans for a long time) and love improve comedy and really wanted to like this movie more than I did. With the exception of his character, the rest of the characters are totally two-dimensional. The still lives-at-home pothead. The emo doodle girl (the only thing missing was a heart on her sleve.) The detached "trouble as a child" girl who now has overly-expressed "issues". The hummus guy was a believable character but just very boring and melodramatic. Some of the dialogue these two-dimensional characters was ok, a little was clever, but most seemed totally contrived.

This is another "dramady", a la Silver-linings Playbook or August in Osage County that attempts to play to both important genres, truly doing neither successfully. This movie does not captivate emotionally as a drama; we never really care about the characters and the plot elements are totally grade school and predictable. That's ok, if it was just meant as a comedy to provide some laughs, but despite a full auditorium, I heard only a few polite chuckles. Common, you have all seen great comedy. This was not really funny - not even by a long shot.

More than anything I'm frustrated, because I really, really wanted to like this movie and want a wonderful Improv comedy movie to come out. Is this what we've come to, when a movie has a quasi-intellectual dilemna about one member of a troup "making it" and others not, that gets 90's and 100's from all the critics? Someone publish a scholarly journal on this one.

To use a line from the movie, when someone is asked why they had a bad day and they complain "I got back earlyyy from Europe". The actors can't help but mock that person as being somewhat petty, self-indulgent and also really just who cares because that's not really something worth dwelling on. Well, the entire movie is like that line. I just had to point that out, because apparently everyone else saw Citizen Kane.