Director: Chad Faust
Writer(s): Faust
Starring: Bella Thorne, Chad Faust, Mickey Rourke and Elizabeth Saunders
My how things have changed for Bella Thorne. Once a Disney superstar, she has since become this generation’s Lindsey Lohan. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration - her fall hasn’t been as far, nor her landing as hard - but she seems to be gradually fading away from the limelight with each passing release. Or at least, losing her credibility.
Now she stars in Girl, as the titular “hero”: a young woman who just wakes up one day and decides she wants to kill the father who abandoned her family several years ago. However, her plan is upended when she arrives in town…only to discover that someone has already offed him.
So, problem solved, right? I mean, she goes to do something, and it’s already done. Doesn’t that mean the mission is accomplished? Sure, she wasn’t the one that got to do it, but someone took out the trash, so to speak, so she should be elated. Instead, she’s upset. The punks who did this all have to pay. Wait...what?
Seriously, that’s the plot. And no, it’s not played for laughs. Unfortunately for us, we know it’s not going to be easy, as the sheriff of the town seems to have it out for our “girl”. Why, could it be because he had something to do with her father’s murder? Why no, it couldn’t be!
The characters exchange poorly-delivered dialogue that sounds like the writer is channeling his inner David Lynch, or Quentin Tarantino; including bizarre conversations about bizarre things in an effort to up the style quotient. But here, it’s all just empty dialogue. None of it feels natural and none of it is even slightly interesting; in fact, the attempts are often embarrassing.
I don’t know if this just hit me in the “right” mood, but this is godawful drivel of the lowest common denominator. It’s a pile of junk in a subgenre that’s already littered with junk: the female revenge film. Thorne just walks around, casually sprouting one-liners and attempting to look "cool" as she avoids death time and time again. She gets shot, and has the same reaction I have when my muscles are sore after an intermediate arm workout. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere else but inside this movie, and I don’t really blame her one bit.
I guess I can partially see the praise: women feeling superior to men is the new “in-thing”, and so it’s the perfect time to release a movie like that into this climate. It’s timely. But timeliness is about the only thing it has going for it, and just because it fits themes that are currently hot trends in Hollywood doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck. Because it does. Very, very hard.
It sucks harder than any movie I can remember in recent memory. Seriously. I’m sure I’ve seen technically worse movies, but this one tops almost all of them for one reason: expectations. You see, I actually had none. Well, I take that back: I thought it would suck. I just never in a million years thought it would be this terrible. It somehow took my expectations, and completely destroyed them in a way that I wasn’t expecting.
I guess its timeliness is the only thing that got it onto a streaming service instead of its rightful place inside the Walmart bargain bin.
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