Review of Paper Towns (2015) by Mrmoviebuff — 15 Sep 2016

Teen romance is done rarely well, most of the time, they feel cliched, uninteresting, and at times, really pretentious. 'Paper Towns', unfortunately, falls for every one of these cliches, and it doesn't use them ironically.

Based on the novel written by John Green (who also wrote 'The Fault in Our Stars'), the movie focuses on a young boy named Quentin Jacobsen (Natt Wolff, who was also in 'The Fault in Our Stars') going through his last year of high school, and has found himself infatuated with a girl named Margo (Cara Delevingne), a girl he's known since childhood. She is a mystery as she is fascinated with strange things that he has trouble understanding, and as they're growing up, she, for some reason, disappears and is nowhere to be seen.

Quentin does everything he can to find her, since they spend one amazing and somewhat risky night together playing pranks on all her former friends as her boyfriend cheats on her. After that night, that's when she strangely disappears for reasons unknown.

Quentin tries to piece everything together to help him look for her and find out where she is. He tells his idiotic and stereotypical best friends, Ben (Austin Abrams) and Marcus (Justice Smith), two young boys so splashed with low-life stereotypes, I often wonder what's a bland, heartbroken teenage boy like Quentin, doing being friends with those two. Then again, why does Quentin fuss so much about Margo? We don't get to know a lot about her, other than the fact that she is a mystery...but there is nothing else to her character.

And that is the biggest mistake that this movie makes, Quentin is just your typical, girl-obsessed teenage boy and Margo is just... a girl. His friends are just walking talking stereotypes as one is plain dumb, and the other is of a different race, but in case his skin color doesn't make that obvious, he falls under typical stereotypes that we see, and they're not funny at all.

The movie just ponders on and on with Quentin piecing together the puzzle to try and find Margo, but I must admit, these characters are so one-dimensional, I stopped caring too early. They may as well have called this movie "Paper Thin".

All the build up also leads to an ending so unsatisfying in its resolution, that I couldn't help but wonder, why is this all worth it? The movie should have had a different ending, that way, at least this wouldn't feel like a waste of an almost two hour movie.