Review of Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) by Dottheeyes — 02 Apr 2016

A few days before the start of the semester at a Texas university, an incoming student athlete moves into the house he is to share with several of the other players on the baseball team. He befriends, is taunted by, and otherwise parties and medicates alongside his new teammates in this "spiritual sequel" to Dazed and Confused, set in 1980 and named after a hit Van Halen single from the same year.

For around 25 minutes, I feared this would be a rare dud for writer and director Richard Linklater, a titan of American independent cinema whose best films include Before Sunset and Boyhood. It is not very enticing at first, the prospect of spending nearly two hours with these oversexed, incredibly uncouth, and almost too perfectly sculpted bastions of testosterone, particularly compared to to the more diverse band of outsiders and squares found in Dazed and Confused.

But the film slowly won me over, subtly deepening certain characters and gesturing toward the transience of their fast and boozy lifestyle without sermonizing. And the comic set pieces sharpen in the second half, including a memorably outlandish visit by the ball-playing bros to a Wonderland-and-Oz-themed party held by performing-arts majors.