Everybody Wants Some!!
Director: Richard Linklater
Talent: Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin, Ryan Guzman, Juston Street
Released: 13th May
Have you ever been told an anecdote by someone who just can’t get their head around actually telling a story? Key details of the narrative get left out only to be frantically returned to later, all the once solid information seems to have become gossamer in a mind agitated by having to make sense of it, punchlines are stumbled into after a beat, or forgotten altogether… it’s a difficult experience, that evokes frustration as much as it does empathy. And it is with a heart made heavy by both of these that I report that with the sexy campus comedy Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater – who only last year told the twelve year-spanning story of a boy reaching adulthood in real time – has somehow found himself out of his depth.
Out of his depth not in the sense that he fails to recount in cinema his experiences of Texan college in the early 1980s (and by all accounts the film is largely autobiographical) but in the sense that he fails to make almost any of these amusing or enlightening in any way. Much of the second-rate lads’ banter from the college baseball team at its core fails at the level of laughs or ingenuity to justify its having been committed to celluloid, and unfortunately this banter accounts for roughly 80% of the film. Couple that with a tone that oscillates between retro American Pie and cloying, Yogi Berra-style folk seriousness (this latter aspect will be familiar to viewers of recent Linklater) and you have a fundamentally confused film, that alienates as much as it entertains.
There are brief moments of real emotional and comedic quality, and Linklater can still shoot a smoking scene, but this lacks all the magic that made Dazed and Confused, to which it is supposedly a spiritual sequel, great. Let down by a so-so script and a largely unremarkable cast, you can file this as one of those stories for which you just had to be there.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
