An average movie

Even though the buzz around this movie was pretty bad, since there was a pretty cool cast involved and since I have seen all the movies directed by Cameron Crowe, I still wanted to check it out (the fact that it was also available on Netflix definitely helped my choice as well). Well, I'm afraid it definitely deserved its poor reputation. Basically, when or before it was released, there was quite some outrage because Emma Stone was playing someone supposedly one quarter Asian and one quarter Hawaïan and even though it was indeed stupid to write her character like that, or to choose her to play such a character, it was not even the biggest problem with this movie. Basically, the biggest issue was that it was just a huge mess. I mean, the directing was solid, the cast was great and there were some good ideas but the mix of all these ingredients was just terrible. To be honest, some of those ideas were actually pretty weak like the fact that John Krasinski's character didn't speak at all. Or the fact that within just 5 minutes, Brian is supposed to be a stupid moron for blowing up a Facebook satellite but then suddenly a hero because it turned out to be a nuclear weapon after all. Coming back to Emma Stone's character, her ethnicity was not even what really bothered me about her. Basically, there was absolutely no clear personality for this girl who kept acting really randomly throughout the whole thing and even Emma Stone's great charisma didn't manage to make this character work whatsoever. To conclude, Cameron Crowe has been struggling for many years but this is by far his weakest directing effort and you might wonder if his career will ever be able to recover from this blow. 

5/10