Review of Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) by Mondo T — 11 Apr 2016

When a movie thinks that it's fun, it needs to actually include the audience in its fun. I went into Everybody Wants Some!! (both exclamation points included) with pretty muted expectations, so I left surprised that I was so disappointed.

Richard Linklater has managed to make a high-concept movie with glimmers of interesting ideas and a cast that's charismatic, but he's far too wrapped up in the nostalgia to actually be able to step back and realize when he's being self-indulgent.

Its moments are there, but they're far too brief. A movie shouldn't rely solely on nostalgia to engage its audience, but that's what Everybody Wants Some!! does, and it ends up feeling like Linklater made this movie because he was having a mid-life crisis and wanted to prove his youth.

This is the part of the review where I'd say what the movie is about, but nothing happens in this movie. I usually have no issue with that--I love movies like The Trip, Frances Ha, and all of Sofia Coppola's filmography.

Essentially, the movie takes place on the weekend before college freshman Jake's (Blake Jenner) first week of class, and it pretty much just follows him and his housemates dicking around. Regarding what does work, the movie obviously is a pretty painstaking depiction of 1980, from its wardrobe to wall-to-wall soundtrack (God knows how much of this budget was spent on music rights, but it helped).

Most of the performers--mostly the supporting players--give good work and demonstrate a great amount of talent, namely some unknown actors by the names of Juston Street, Wyatt Russell, and Zoey Deutch.

A lot of the cast elevates the material with their presence, energy, and delivery, and they pretty much act as the saving grace for this movie. At the very worst, some performances are mediocre and a little stiff, namely Jenner, the lead.

As mentioned before, there are some brief set pieces and jokes that work, but unfortunately, they're drilled into the ground. The end-all, be-all problem with this movie is how caught up Richard Linklater gets in himself.

The movie is two hours and has no right to be so long considering the fact that it has enough content to fill about thirty minutes. There's no throughline or arc, and although movies can entirely work like that--some of my favorite movies are as described--it thinks that it's clever and original, having the audacity to essentially repeat the same scenes with different locations and a slow pace.

Almost every scene goes on for too long or is too one-note. It was after the first forty of 116 minutes that I started checking what time it was, and to the movie's credit, it had moments that engaged me, but they're lost in a sea of nothing more than stereotypical bro humor and themes about finding yourself, which the movie seems to think is more original than it is.

I'm okay with a movie being realistic, but when it's boring, that's where I start to become restless. Another issue that I had was how old a lot of the cast is, and despite a few of them playing college seniors, the guys don't look the part.

This especially applies to Jenner, the lead, who's supposed to have finished high school about three months beforehand, but he looks like he's in his late twenties. His appeal depends on who he's playing off of, so it isn't like what he brought to the movie redeemed the issue.

A movie like this can be lighthearted fun, but it has to bother to actually include the audience. Don't just show drunk and high college kids; make me feel drunk and high. When the audience it's directly feeling what the protagonist is in a movie like this, the point is sort of lost.

Everybody Wants Some!! is technically sound (minus a split-screen phone conversation with about five times as many cuts than needed), but it's surprisingly disappointing and increasingly feels like a chore to watch than a pleasure, minus its very brief and overshadowed moments of observing people's personalities and actions.

Without the actors showcased here, Everybody Wants Some!! could have crossed into flat-out bad territory, but a lot of the performances are just so great, and hopefully from people that we'll be seeing a lot more of.

As for Linklater, I hope that he can rebound quickly, because the chances are that if you think that you're clever and cute while writing something and while directing it later, it isn't that clever or cute.

4.6/10, lame, two thumbs down, below average, etc.