Allow me to be a hater for a moment. This is slop. A “simulacrum of a movie” is how my friend described it. It certainly has all the parts of a movie, but it’s not clear the writer-director actually knew what they’re supposed to be used for. Every scene was so painfully rote you would be better off playing what you think the rest of the movie will be in your head—you’d likely be right, and it’d be over much sooner.
The main character is one note and difficult to empathize with. Not because she makes bad choices or does bad things, but because her reasoning, her motivations, are difficult to relate to at best. She’s not complex, and her character arc doesn’t tie in to the main hook of “student loan debt pushes woman to the edge,” she just..kinda sucks? The Rotten Tomatoes audience blurb says that the movie is great, even if the characters can be a bit “unlikable”—characters don’t need to be likable, just understandable or interesting. She was neither.
What really first signaled to me that this was gonna be a shit show, however, was one of the many scenes in which the director essentially turns the camera around to give a lecture on the economic plight of the modern worker. Here’s a direct quote from the protagonist’s boss maybe thirty minutes into the film: “are you an employer? No, you’re an independent contractor, so quit talking like you got rights and go back to work.” He then asked in a similar manner if she had a union shop steward. She did not. If it’s not clear, the problem isn’t the message, which I agree with, but the fact that the audience is being talked down to like they’re idiots. The dialogue is nonsensical. Nobody talks like this! It is, as you say, cringe.
This pattern of having no show and all tell is repeated throughout the dialogue, but is most noticeable in these preachy scenes full of snarky comebacks and blunt politics that seem crafted specifically to become viral clips—in fact, I realized halfway through one of them that I had indeed seen it before in full on Twitter. That this seems to be a “clickbait movie” (to borrow another idea from my friend) is an extremely depressing thought.
The most depressing thing, however, and the thing that inspired me to write this review of what would ordinarily be just another mediocre film, is that this movie has amazing reviews. 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 200 critics. “Plaza’s Michael Corleone” writes David Roth for Observer. I feel like I’m in a fever dream. Does John Patton Ford have a gun to the head of these reviewers? Are we watching the same AI recreation of what a movie looks like? Or are they somehow looking past the mess because of how “important” it is in its “social commentary”?
This is an airplane movie at best. That’s one step above a 30 Rock movie. When my friend and I saw some random movie on Netflix starring Aubrey Plaza that we’d never heard of with an intriguing enough premise and incredibly high ratings, we felt we had to see it. Before we hit play, I said “I can’t wait for this to actually be shit.” I just didn’t trust it, and I thought it would be hilarious if that turned out to be the case. I was right that it was shit, but it was less funny and more maddening.
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