Review of The Dinner (2017) by Lovro H — 31 Aug 2017

Oh my dear God. I knew the book was horrible, but I actually hoped this movie would be more tolerable considering the cast and the director. The Dinner is a massive failure on every level. I barely sat through it and I want proof that I've finished the movie, which is why I'm writing this review.

The Dinner follows two couples and their kids. The kids, teenage sons, have killed a homeless person, recorded it and posted it online. The parents are meeting at dinner to talk about this incident. Before I even get to tearing this movie apart, I'd just like to say how unbelievably absurd this story is.

What to tear apart first? Let's start with the editing. The editing of this movie is a complete disaster. The flashback scenes are always very, very bright and it looks like someone just turned up the glow/brightness in Sony Vegas.

It's very distracting and makes the movie look very cheap and incompetent. The very beginning of the movie, the "credits section", looks great and I thought I'd be in for a very visually beautiful movie, but as soon as those credits are over, everything goes downhill.

The present scenes look boring and the colour palette is very basic and there's nothing interesting going on visually. The direction is fairly decent, but again, there's not much you can really do with a story like this where it's mostly just four people sitting at a table and talking.

The worst sequence in the entire movie has to be the 10 minute exposition about the Battle of Gettysburg. It's the most pointless thing I've seen in a movie ever and it's the ugliest and most confusingly edited sequence in the entire movie.

It doesn't even have anything to do with the story. It's just there to prove how much Paul is obsessed with history and how he "lives in the past", which was stated before already, there was no need for this long, pretentious, sequence.

Moving onto the actors. These are all great actors, I'm not going to debate that. Richard Gere, Steve Coogan, Chloe Sevigny, Laura Linney etc. They're all great, but this movie doesn't give them much to act on.

I also have no idea what Steve Coogan is doing in this movie. He's British, but he has a terrible American accent in this movie. Why not just hire someone who already has an American accent? Sure, Steve Coogan is a great actor, but anyone could've been there instead of him.

I hate when actors do fake accents, it rarely works and is just distracting. Everybody else does a decent job, but I've seen better from each of them. The characters are the real problem here. When a movie does this sort of a story where it's a small number of actors in one room, you have to make sure the characters are interesting to watch.

Exam, Buried, Cube, Primer... These are some examples where that was done right. The Dinner is an example of how not to write characters. Every single character, except for the waiter, is completely unlikeable and unrelatable.

There wasn't a single character for which I cared or for which I rooted. Everybody is constantly angry and mean-spirited; none of them are really even thinking rationally. The movie doesn't even make sense.

It's filled with plotholes. First one that comes to mind is that (spoilers ahead) the kids who burned the homeless woman aren't dealing with any consequences. We see on the news that the woman was found by firemen and the police.

We also know that the kids posted the video online and it got a lot of views. We're also shown this video and you can clearly hear them saying their names. How did nobody find them? The police doesn't seem to be involved in the movie at all.

The parents are even debating whether they should contact the police or not! Makes no sense. Furthermore, why didn't the parents punish their children? When you start the movie, nobody seems concerned at all about what their kids did, even though they all know about it.

The kids aren't even grounded and there isn't a single scene where the parents are angry at the kids. We get flashback scenes to the kids swearing at the homeless woman, throwing garbage at her and then burning her alive while filming it and laughing at her, but the parents don't even care? One of the moms even tries to justify their actions by saying how the homeless are a problem and shouldn't be on the streets.

I couldn't understand a single action these characters do. Moving onto the ending. The main event of the movie is these people talking about their sons and figuring out what they should do with them.

Before that happens, we're treated with about 90 minutes of them talking about how they need to talk about it and countless scenes where a character gets mad and leaves the table just when they're about to talk about it.

It's very frustrating to watch at first, but then you get used to it and stop caring so when they finally sit down and talk about their kids, you're left completely uninterested and just want the movie to be over.

So, 90 minutes into the movie the big talk finally starts and it lasts for a few minutes and they don't decide anything. In short, nothing happens in the movie. Absolutely nothing of relevance happens in the movie.

The movie literally ends on a, sort of a, cliffhanger. One of the dads drives to the other family's home to beat their son because their son was blackmailing his son. The dad, Paul, grabs a rock and is about to hit the kid when another car drives up and Paul is stopped.

Then the two dads fight and it's done. The movie is over. Credits roll and you're left there thinking about how horrible what you saw was and how you could've spent these 2 hours in a better way.

The Dinner is absolute garbage that I strongly do not recommend. It's one of the worst movies I have seen come out this year and will most certainly end up on my "Top 10 Worst Movies of 2017" list.

Pretentious, dull, tedious, repetitive, pointless and, above all, frustrating. That is The Dinner.