An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was starring Andrew Garfield, I was still eager to check it out. At some point, I made a list about The Coppola Dinasty and, if you count only the directors, there are already 9 of them. Well, it is the first movie I saw directed by Gia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola’s granddaughter. It wasn’t really well received when it was released and, well, I would have to agree that the damned thing was not really good. It’s too bad because focusing on the phenomenon of YouTubers and influencers definitely had some potential though. I mean, I don’t use social media so I have basically zero knowledge about influencers but I did follow Enzo Knol, the most famous Dutch YouTuber for years with my daughter. Nowadays, kids are actually more interested in this type of entertainment than watching movies or series (at least, that’s definitely the case with my daughter) and it was intriguing to see how something like this might start and how it would work behind the curtains. Unfortunately, the whole thing was above all rather poorly written. In the beginning, the meet-cute with Frankie and Link was too quirky but they both had an intriguing personality so it still worked. Unfortunately, pretty much everything else afterwards was either unconvincing or not interesting or a combination of both. Basically, they uploaded some rather random video of Link doing some random stuff and he became viral overnight? I’m pretty sure that most YouTubers would tell you that it doesn’t work like that. However, the whole thing became even more underwhelming afterwards. Indeed, suddenly, after this success, Link’s behavior completely changed and he became a major douchebag consumed by his success which was the least interesting trajectory that they could have followed for this character. For Frankie, it was even worse though. Indeed, even though she seemed to be the main character at first, she became so passive and maybe even more pathetic than when the movie started. At least, Andrew Garfield once again didn’t disappoint, playing a completely different character this time around and the guy was so charismatic and quite spellbinding as usual. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, I still think it is worth a look, if only for Garfield’s solid performance but, so far, it is clear that Gia still needs to learn a bit more if she wants to become a worthy member of the Coppola Directors Dynasty.

6/10