Oh dear, what a mess. It might be easier to say what isn’t in this new movie about the ‘80s (billed misnomerishly as “the spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused”). There’s no humor, no tension, no pathos, no arc, no new twist on a decade that inspired wonderful films like Boogie Nights, Back to the Future and The Breakfast Club. In fact, it isn’t a story at all, but a tedious plod through an inconsequential string of dull scenes, shamelessly lazy depictions of ‘80s college life. Someone (we don’t remember who, and it doesn’t matter) fills a water bed with a leaky garden hose and chugs beer through a plastic baseball bat. Someone puts cheap cologne down his trousers and has sex in a closet. Someone half-reads a Jack Kerouac novel, babbles philosophical nonsense after a suck on a bong, punts beer cans off a roof and talks on an avocado-colored phone.
So it isn’t strictly true that there’s nothing here, for there are 1980s cliches by the fistful. This is paint-by-numbers ‘80s: disco balls and Gremlins, plaited belts and polyester, pointy-collared shirts. There’s enough Schlitz to sink a ship, and by the end, we were bored stiff with jocks in bad hair and high-waisted, bulgy-crotched jeans. Even the music’s lazy: ‘Shake your Groove Thing’ … ‘Ladies Night’ … I said a hip hop, hippie to the hippie, and so (tediously) on. Sadly, there’s no comeuppance for the jarring sexism that rears its unattractive head in full-screen breast and buttocks shots (and words like ‘poontang’), or the director’s perplexing decision to cast a single black actor.
About halfway through, one of the jocks (did we even mention they’re all members of a baseball team?) says, “We’re in the early innings. We’ve got a whole game to play.” Need we say our hearts sank?
Should You See It? No.—A.B.
Viewed at Washington University George Warren Brown School