Directed By Augustine Frizzell
Starring – Maia Mitchell, Camila Morrone, Kyle Mooney
The Plot – Jessie (Morrone) and Angela (Mitchell), high school dropout BFFs, are taking a week off to chill at the beach. Too bad their house got robbed, rent’s due, they’re about to get fired, and they’re broke. Now they’ve gotta avoid eviction, stay out of jail and get to the beach, no matter what.
Rated R for crude sexual content and adult language throughout, drug use and brief nudity – all involving teens.
POSITIVES
– A harvested value of friendship that bonds the female leads and the audience alike. It’s rare to see this kind of female chemistry being exuberated on film, and not since “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion”, has a duo felt so in-sync to the point of them often feeling like the same person. Much of what you feel for this film will rely on your investment upon these characters alone, and my satisfaction with the work of Mitchell and Morrone, that feels like they’ve been friends for years, puts it right up there with Michael Cera and Jonah Hill from “Superbad”, in terms of sharp comedic timing and tag team banter that never withered under the dependability of them in the film. On a superficial level, the girls are remarkably beautiful, and I mention this because the lack of makeup on them throughout the film gives their characters that stripped down edge that values them for so much more than just a pretty face.
– Frizzell’s respect for the characters. It would certainly be easy to mock and ridicule Jessie and Angela for their limited social standings in life that come off as less than desirable initially, but in pulling the camera back through 82 minutes of exposition, Augustine highlights the drive in ambition and intelligence that keeps pushing them forward, proving that they are anything but dumb stereotypes. Women will love this angle because it shows the unapologetic rawness of two leading ladies, combined with the emphasis and intrigue to value the story that is theirs and many like them who are watching at home.
– Weight within the Fort Worth environment. This film reminded me a lot of last year’s “The Florida Project”, in that the humidity and steaming decay of western mini malls and temporary business fronts overcrowd the area, giving way to a mentality that opportunity is present, it’s just limited in terms of prospering and potential growth. The landscapes here are staged with an appearance of advantageous commercialism, and additionally the bleak surroundings of a claustrophobic apartment that sees our ladies sharing a bed to get by. It’s not quite the slums, but it’s not entirely far off either, and Frizzell’s dependency on the setting here instills even more empathy for the characters that you would otherwise overlook in a conventional setting.
– I am not an easy laugher by any means, and “Never Goin Back” had me chuckling to the point that I required pauses in between readings of dialogue. What’s charming to me is that this isn’t simply actresses reading lines, it’s also R-rated bodily humor that never relents, facial documentation that allows you to accurately read what the character is thinking or going through at that moment, and especially the work of some zany supporting characters around our two leads that attribute to what feels like their normalcy. It’s a world inside of a world that is colorfully articulated, and it leads to one of the best comedies of the 2018 Summer season.
– Intelligent use of easy listening favorites. Without question, my favorite aspect of the film is in the occasional inserts of sax-heavy tracks that audibly narrate the disgust or the desire of a character need in the frame at that particular moment. It feels like irresistible delves into the psyche of two stoners, whose minds are always on the hamster wheel, and allows us that rare opportunity to pull away from them and laugh at their torturous disposition. I definitely won’t give away anything here, but any movie that can add layers to Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed To Live Without You” is brilliant in my book, and the scene that it accompanies could be a gift-wrapped present to IHOP if they were wise enough to take advantage of it.
– As easy of a sit as you’re going to get. As I Mentioned earlier, the film barely clocks in at 82 minutes of recorded film, and the progression of the free-flowing narrative combined with the untimely mayhem of what transpires along the way, moves the pacing miles ahead of what is asked of it, allowing “Never Goin Back” the power to keep the audience firmly in its entertaining grasp without convoluting or alienating audiences along the way.
– 90’s weightless cinema at its finest. This film feels like a more-than worthy representative of what I call “Hang around comedy”, a frequently visited subgenre at the turn of the 21st century that gave us classics like “Clerks” or “Empire Records” among others, and fed into the notion of so much happening to a limited amount of characters in a day or two of story time. In this aspect, what feels like the end of the world for Jessie and Angela is really just another day for those around them, and I respected Frizzell for this status of script that gives the film a positively throwaway sense of viewing by audience. These are the kind of films intended when people say to shut your mind off and just enjoy, and for a movie with such a limited range of impact, it certainly left a lasting memory on me hours after I watched it.
NEGATIVES
– The subplot involving Jessie’s brother (Played by Joel Allen), is entertaining enough in its element, but to me required a bit more satire and commentary in fully fleshing out a character who is twice as lazy and degraded as our two leads. There isn’t a positive male influence anywhere in this film, and that’s OK, I don’t mind that, but the overabundance of time devoted to him despite a subplot that goes literally nowhere is something that I felt unnecessarily weighed down his character arc, and never allowed him the opportunity to grow as anything other than the loser we first meet in minute eleven of the film.
– It made me a bit uncomfortable that two characters who are mentioned as being 16 or 17, are oogled upon in the most Michael Bay method of visual storytelling that you could possibly imagine. Considering this is all helmed by a woman, it’s a bit of a disappointment that her one glaring flaw is in the way that she, like many male directors before her, objectify women in the most awkward and unnecessary manner that Hollywood can offer. Are these two beautiful women? Yes, but they’re beautiful because of their undying spirits despite life’s brutal hammering, and it constantly felt I learned that when the movie didn’t.
– Late reveals during the final scenes of the third act involving a restaurant owner, felt a bit too convenient for me on two separate occasions. The first, a reveal about his occupation proves just how small the worlds inside of a movie can be, but the second reveal caters to a character mention earlier that should have been nothing more than a disposable drop of dialogue. Instead, drawing this out to be a major factor in the film’s conclusion hints that Frizzell is a student of coincidence, giving the ending a contradicting feeling of surrealism that tucks it away neatly.
My Grade: 7/10 or a B-