Review of The Spectacular Now (2013) by Facebook U — 14 Jul 2017

The first half is excellent. A natural and believable teenage love story. It's paced well, it's consistently interesting and the performances are great. But then it overstays its welcome. The performances remain good, but the story stops being interesting and ends up relying way too heavily on some over-stretched side plots.

And once my story investment exausted, the dialogue seemed more forced and the characters seemed much more like caricatures. The film's spell was simply broken. I don't know where they could've taken things to stay fresh, and I guess the screenwriters didn't either, so perhaps this would've worked better as a short film.

And I'm not even sure what didn't work here, since there are hundreds of stellar romance-driven films that avoided these problems. I didn't hate the second half of the film. It was just as well-made as the first.

I think the main problem was just a lack of real, engaging motivation.