Directed By Castille Landon
Starring – Kathy Bates, Diane Keaton, Alfre Woodard
The Plot – Follows Nora (Keaton), Ginny (Bates), and Mary (Woodard), three childhood best friends who used to spend every summer at a sleep away camp together. After years, when the opportunity to get back together for a summer camp reunion presents itself, they all seize it.
Rated PG-13 for sexual material, strong adult language and some underage smoking.
Summer Camp | Official Trailer | In theaters May 31 (youtube.com)
POSITIVES
Like a squirrel in search of a nut to provide enough nourishment for survival, I slashed through enough trash to support a landfill, in turn finding two meaningful merits that kept ‘Summer Camp’ from being the worst movie of 2024. The first is easily in the elevated approach to performances of Woodard, who not only doesn’t belong in this movie as a result of the dramatic depth and humanity that she supplants to the character, but also feels like a breath of fresh air every time the movie decided to spend a scene on her character’s development, leading to what feels like one of the only defined arcs of progressive storytelling throughout the whole film. Beyond Woodard, the only other praise that I can give this movie is in a downright remarkable soundtrack that proves what little money this film had in budgetary purposes went to licensing such infectious tracks of the mostly classic rock variety. ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ by ZZ Top, ‘Summer of 69’ by Bryan Adams, and ‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival are just a few decorated selections that inscribe a childlike innocence to the proceedings where the material simply can’t, and while the tracks lyrically don’t play to what materializes in the foreground of the storytelling, it is an unforeseen splendid addition to a film that values even the smallest beneficial dividends.
NEGATIVES
In my fourteen years writing about films, there’s definitely been worse films than ‘Summer Camp’, but none that I can remember that treated me to some a vapid void of entertainment value or investment that drives most cinematic successes. From around the ten minute mark in the film, I knew that this one just wasn’t for me, not because of it serving to fill the quota of the annual geriatric installment, where elderly actresses exude the raunchiness of teenagers, mind you, but rather the lack of convincing and effective material, which grinded this film to a screeching halt from the word go. Categorizing this movie as a comedy is an audacious labeling, especially since the gags in dialogue are delivered without an emphasizing punchline. Either that or the ensemble constantly bumbles their executions. More on them in a second. When the actors aren’t unloading this crude kind of behavior that feels downright pathetic coming from such acclaimed names, we’re given the worst kind of Nickelodeon Channel slapstick sequences that lack any semblance of believability or unpredictability to the end results that they bring to the table, leaving me and the surrounding elderly audience to groan in the baffling notion that a movie like this can’t even appeal to its target demographic. In addition to the material, the storytelling is practically non-existent for roughly the first hour of the film, with shallow characterization and one-off experiences making the script feel like the writers are literally making things up as they go along, with nothing in the way of substantial arguments to make me think otherwise. When the script finally does realize that there’s a half hour left, and that we better build something, anything of substance to fool audiences into thinking they actually learned something, it’s in a third act distancing so temporary and undeserving that it’s literally solved in the same scene that it’s surmised, with the movie’s groundbreaking revelation being that friends are important to share every memory with. These aforementioned aspects obviously make ‘Summer Camp’ a tediously arduous task to even get through at 90 minutes, but when you consider the pacing never elevates itself above clumsy, it makes the minutes feel like miles in a marathon where you’ve already run out of gas within the first quarter mile of the trek, resulting in a trainwreck happening in slow motion that I only wish I was standing in front of. Then there’s the film’s technical components, which I didn’t expect to talk about in a movie unoriginal and by-the-numbers, but far too sloppy and compromising to ever let go without owning up to the responsibility that it plays in so many laughably bad executions. The editing is an introductory class on how obliterate continuity, with character placements in any setting deviating incredibly between the cuts of angular transition. When the film begins, it pertains to an expressive gimmick that tries to add some flare to the presentation for how characters are introduced and brought into the fold, but it gives up quickly on this objective, before lending its talents to the surprising amounts of special effects during physical sequences mostly involving wildlife, that attain as much believability as Tyler Perry portraying a woman. It’s bad enough that the stunt people for each actress looks nothing like their big name counterparts in everything from profile to skin tone, but it’s made so much worse when the actresses themselves are elicited into the sequence with stock footage that was obviously shot in a green-screen studio, while the footage of the stunt people were done on location, in the heat of the moment, resulting in these horrendously artificial depictions of capture that can’t suspend disbelief for a single solitary second. The production also falls suspect to some of the worst audio deposits in post-production that I have experienced this year, which obviously are there to aid in some of the incapability of the ensemble. The worst unfortunately comes from Keaton, whose overhead lines of dialogue not only don’t mimic the movements of her lips, but also sound a bit too distant from the microphone, in the room that she’s recording them in, making the deliveries of her character constantly feel like she’s running from one room to another, for absolutely no reason what so ever. Finally, while it pains me to call out actors and actresses so ingrained into the twilight of their respective careers, the performances outside of Woodard are a colossal disaster, beginning with Keaton, who has trouble conveying any kind of emotion outside of her familiar awkwardness, with a commitment to line reads that constantly feel like she’s questioning what she’s being asked to convey. Keaton has very little to add to the character, but her time on-screen becomes even more underwhelming when held in tow to love interest, Eugene Levy, with the two of them having more chemistry as siblings than romantic interests. Levy himself falls suspect without his typical abundance of dry charisma enhancing the material, but it’s even stranger when he’s asked to portray this suave leading man, to which he isn’t remotely qualified for. The saddest of these disturbances easily comes from a supporting turn from Beverly D’Angelo, whose eyes so evidently drift out of frame so often that she’s obviously reading cue cards off-screen, all while orchestrating one of the most annoying fangirl characters that I can remember in recent memory, all as a device to further sell how powerful Kathy Bates character truly is. She’s the leader of this group of plastics who are at least initially introduced as antagonists to our central trio, but it never leads to anything confrontational between the respective groups, leaving the antagonists as superfluous and unnecessary as D’Angelo coming out of retirement once more to perform this role.
OVERALL
‘Summer Camp’ is every bit forgettable as it is fake, with underwhelming humor and uninspired performances aplenty, which feel especially tragic for the talent assembled. With a remedially superfluous script, amateur production values, and underbaked characterization and conflict, the film simply exists as a content filler for geriatrics seeking representation, and one that hopefully and thankfully they won’t remember, ten minutes after they’ve left the theater.
My Grade: 2/10 or F-