Thanks for checking out our Adventureland review.
In the months leading up to the release of Adventureland, I’ve never understood why the marketing machine wasn’t putting a lot more emphasis on the fact that Greg Mottola (also directed Superbad) had written and directed it, or that Twilight superstar Kristen Stewart was one of the primary leads… especially since we’re still in the middle of the massive Twilight hype and that the DVD just came out a little while ago. To be honest, the trailers themselves haven’t looked all that interesting… or funny… so they needed to play on something to get people interested right?
I mean hell… at least play up Ryan Reynolds being in it or something. Because as it stood, you could feel that there weren’t a lot of people interested in seeing this film with the original marketing strategy. As it turns out I was right because on it’s opening weekend Adventureland made an abysmal $6 million dollars. Nice.
So off I go to see Adventureland. Was it as bad as the $6 million results suggest? No… actually it’s a pretty endearing movie… but unfortunately it’s also pretty boring.
THE GENERAL IDEA
The synopsis for Adventureland reads something like this: “Inspired by writer/director Greg Mottola’s own true-life job-from-hell experience, Adventureland stars The Education of Charlie Banks’ Jesse Eisenberg as an uptight recent college graduate who discovers that he’ll have to get a degrading minimum-wage job at a local amusement park instead of spending his summer drinking German beer, visiting world-class museums, and flirting with cute French girls. It’s the summer of 1987, and James Brennan (Eisenberg) has just graduated college. James is all set to embark on his dream tour of Europe when his parents (Wendie Malick and Jack Gilpin) suddenly announce that they won’t be able to subsidize the trip. Now the only things James has to look forward to this summer are sugar-fueled children, belligerent dads, and an endless parade of giant stuffed animals. When James strikes up a relationship with captivating co-worker Em (Kristen Stewart), however, he finally starts to loosen up. Suddenly, the worst summer ever doesn’t seem quite so bad.”
THE GOOD
Although the film is set in 1987, the issues and challenges feel very contemporary. A young man whose dreams have to be put on hold due to financial hardship faced by his family and resorts to working in a job he (and everyone else) deems beneath him in order to save money for graduate school. The film deals with this and the charcters involved in a very real and raw way and was, in my opinion, the strongest element of the film.
I don’t hide that I’m a Ryan Reynolds fan. I’ve become more and more impressed with his acting chops over the years and in Adventureland he’s handed a challenging character to play. The older married guy having affairs with younger women… yet is a “good” guy, a guy you feel bad for instead of angry at for some reason. I don’t think there are a lot of actors who could have effectively pulled this character off as the director intended as well as Reynolds did… delivering what I think is the most interesting and complex character of the movie.
The film has an interesting (not fantastic) sense of nostalgia to it. Those summers we all had, working crappy jobs, speculating about the future, dreaming of escaping the town/situations we were in some day, trying to score with the girls we worked with and counting how many hook ups happened over the summer. The movie does a good job of transporting us back to those times and the feelings and sensations that come along with it.
THE BAD
This is a boring movie. This is also a comedy without many laughs. I think I chuckled twice during the whole movie. The nostalgia is great to have. The social/economic/coming of age issues the film deals with are great to have… but a comedy has to make you laugh and entertain you, and for the most part this movie simply doesn’t deliver… nor does the story have any sense of pace to it. The movie just lingers without any sense of passage of time. Suddenly a character says “we’ve been doing this for a month” and I’m like “What? A month has passed?” because nothing in the narrative itself even remotely suggested it… then they just announce to you that the summer is over. Without this sense of time or pacing, you never get engaged in how the relationship are supposed to be developing or moving forward at all… thus much of the effectiveness of the movie is neutered before it’s even given a chance to conceptualize for the audience.
I’m really starting to hate when a comedy movie keeps going back to the same joke over and over and over and over again. In Adventureland I lost count of how many times they went back to the “punched in the balls” joke. Had to have been at least 5 or 6 times they did the exact same gag. Ha ha ha… yes… I get it… that guy punching the other guy in the balls is supposed to be funny. Can we please move on to something else now?
The whole movie it felt like the lead, Jesse Eisenberg, felt like he was just doing a Michael Cera imitation (who the director worked with in Superbad and I get the feeling he really wanted in this role) and it gets very annoying after a little while… at least for me.
Kristen Stewart did not impress me. Her character, Em, had a lot of potential to it… but her portrayal just felt bland to me and without much soul.
OVERALL
Adventureland is a good movie… that I simply found impossible to enjoy or be entertained by at all. Slow, paceless, boring and worst of all not funny. Some great subjects and nuances are captured in this movie… but it just flat out fails to entertain. I can understand why some other people would like or even love this film… I really can… but for me I just couldn’t wait for the credits to roll so I could leave. Overall I give Adventureland a 4 out of 10.
