Wednesday, August 03, 2022

Not Okay (2022)

Zoey Deutch is so very good in this just-about-okay film, I ended up vicariously regretting her choice of being in it. 

We've only recently seen her in The Outfit, an obvious step up (and coincidentally, there too paired against a dickwad love interest played by Dylan O'Brien). Maybe she signed both dotted lines around the same time? 



The trouble is that she makes a character set up to be unlikeable, vaguely likeable. Writer-director Quinn Shepherd has tried to offset this problem by introducing a woke paragon in the form of school shooting victim Rowan, but this then breaks what I see as the golden rule of satire — nobody in the story can be excused from ridicule. 

The screenplay makes some questionable choices in terms of believability and good taste. It ought to have danced in step with the zeitgeist, yet often felt clumsily off beat. 

The more revealing dramas about social media tend to be projections — e.g. Black Mirror — rather than attempts to whack the highly mobile mole in the moment. 

The characters that share the office with Danni at 'Depravity' are perhaps the movie's biggest fail, especially a young man with South-Asian roots and a couple of unnecessarily nasty LGBT roles. 

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