Alright, this has to stop. Following the Unfriended movies, this is the third movie that I’ve seen that takes place entirely via a computer screen. This gimmick needs to be killed with fire. I initially thought that maybe, just maybe this would change my mind about this kind of film. It’s in a different genre than Unfriended, has a credible actor and has been receiving some positive buzz. Well, none of that matters because this is an awful, borderline unwatchable way to make a movie. My friend, who has never seen the Unfriended movies, came with me and was genuinely interested in seeing this. Afterward, he turned to me and said “Dude, that wasn’t even a fucking movie!” Amen, my friend. A-fucking-men.
John Cho (best known as Harold of Harold & Kumar) plays a father whose daughter goes missing and he investigates her disappearance. Since this takes place on a computer, he investigates by reading her text conversations and looking through her social media accounts. Ever spent two hours watching someone looking though a teenaged girl’s social media? It’s riveting. And that’s basically the entire plot. Fucking riveting.
I can’t even describe how mind-numbing it is to watch a story unfold this way. It’s two hours of watching text conversations and Google searches and video clips of teenagers discussing inane bullshit that only modern kids could consider interesting enough to document on video. Oh, and this shit isn’t edited. You know how you will change your mind about texts, delete things and rephrase things before actually sending the message? Well, we get to see that in real-time because fuck editing, we need to capture the true excitement of texting on the big screen. For fuck’s sake, even when the characters get into a car, we watch their travels as moving dots on a Google Maps screen. Did I mention that I watched this in a Dolby Cinema theater? You know, the one where they charge you extra for bullshit upgrades to the sound and picture? It’s when I’m sitting in a premium theater with a $21 ticket and watching a fucking Google Maps screen that I begin to question why I do this to myself.
How about characters, writing and cinematography? Fuck all of that. There really aren’t any characters here because the format doesn’t really allow it. Do you really get to know people from their texts? Hell no. The actors also don’t get much of a chance to give performances, since frowning in front of a camera isn’t really much acting direction. I like John Cho, but this really isn’t worth his time. Harold and Kumar Search for Their Missing Children would be a far more entertaining film, largely because it would actually be a film. As I said in my review of Unfriended 2 (or Dark Web or whatever the fuck that was called), “filming” a movie this way doesn’t allow for much because there is a static camera angle. Really, this is just a way for non-filmmakers to make movies. And that pisses me off. This is also a mystery whose resolution revolves around absurd coincidences and people doing asinine things, so it doesn’t even work as a product of its genre.
I don’t have much to say about this because it isn’t really a movie as I understand the word. This is lazy, talentless bullshit that wraps a crappy mystery inside an awful filmmaking technique (and I cringed as I even wrote the word “technique,” and that indicates far too much credibility). I have wondered if these exist to attract more millennials to the theater by simulating the experience of staring at a phone. That sounds ridiculous, but I can’t think of an actual creative reason why a director or writer would do this. And that depresses me more than paying $21 to watch a goddamn Google Maps screen in a theater.
Image By: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Searching.png
