You've seen this before. The title may not be familiar to you, and the same could go for the cast, but you've seen this before. A comedy-romance tale of teenage love, trust, friendship, bitching, underdogs and self-discovery, The Duff is never outright unlikeable, but is lazy to the point of being a Greatest Hits / cover-version of all high-school comedies, ever. Only with extra hashtags. That's what the kids like, apparently.
You really get the feeling that the movie has been written by a middle-aged man (and it was) who has a teenage daughter and mistakenly believes he understands them as a result. There's a Batman reference in there, but it's not Affleck. Not even Bale. It's a nod to the 1989 Keaton flick. The film also features a faux-awkward Spinal Tap reference. I was actually starting to think that as a 40-something geek, maybe I was the target demographic after all. Usually I'd say 'we were all there once', but I'm not sure that screenwriter Josh Cagan has ever actually been a teenager. (Note to Mr. Cagan: You don't get unfriend-notifications on Facebook. Please use Facebook before writing about Facebook*1. Thanks.)
Leading the pack of stereotypes is Mae Whitman, who has already (more than) earned her comedy stripes, and is so much better than this film that I suspect she may have taken the role to prove the point to her agent. And although he's likeable enough as a supporting player, Robbie Amell does seem to have 'young Tom Cruise' as his practiced, default expression. What kind of aspiration is that for the next generation of actors?
The film uses a few on-screen graphic displays which it fails to maintain as an ongoing meme (perhaps thankfully), and also has some fantasy/daydream sequences and an inner-monologue in the same sporadic manner. Almost as if they've been tacked on as an afterthought in post-production but weren't able to be expanded out as a feature. Luckily when it *does* work (which is more often than I'm making it sound, to be fair), The Duff coasts on charm rather than merit, although that by no means papers over the cracks. The film is typified by that moment where a character switches off a bedside lamp, and the technician who's been tasked with turning on the blue lighting state that passes for night-time in movies, does so a fraction of a second too late. And that's the take which makes the final cut. It's lazy, cliched and as transparently false as the stuck-up characters it claims to be preaching against.
The Duff will be fine for audiences young enough to be tasting the formula for the first time, but it'll seem a little stale to everyone else.
If the final twenty minutes of the film were any more patronising, director Ari Sandel would need to man the door as the credits rolled so that he could pat every audience member on the head as they left.
*1 Fair play, the film-makers have somehow got both Apple and Google to sign off on using their branding (a feat which a significant number of films either can't or won't do). We also get an ad-shot from Urban Dictionary, although I suspect that license probably came out of the petty cash ;)
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
The trick with supernatural horror as a genre is making your audience believe in the threat, at least for the duration of the film. If they go into the theatre already convinced that the angry spirits of the netherworld are waiting to pounce upon the living via wooden SMS messaging, then that's fine. If hardline skeptics emerge blinking into the foyer afterwards, shrugging off an hour and a half of solid scares, that's also fine. But if you make no attempt to convince the doubters, even through characters in your film, then it's going to be an eye-rolling ride. There are no cynical characters in Ouija, just a bunch of teenagers who appear to be auditioning for Final Destination 6.
Ouija is a film for the emotionally vulnerable people who, in the wake of the unexplained death of a close friend, think that the best way of dealing with that grief and confusion is by waving a flag into the spirit world and seeing who's up for a chat. Ouija is a film for people who, when reacting to an unknown intruder on the other side of a door, hide in the closet. Ouija is a film for people who have a stern old Puerto Rican housemaid who appears only three times; once to establish her character, once to tut and frown at the ouija-board, and finally to tell them how to destroy it*1. Ouija is a film for anyone born in the last twenty years who absent-mindedly toys with a plastic penguin on a ball-chain not realising that it's a novelty USB-drive, despite it looking exactly like a novelty USB-drive. Ouija is a film for people whose unlit house at midnight is perfectly navigable, but who need an actual torch to see in a short underpass with daylight streaming in from both ends. Ouija is a film for any teenager in this actual day and age who'd approach their grieving friend holding a spirit-board and ask, without an iota of irony, "…what's that?"
Ouija is a film which realises it's been staggeringly lacklustre in its build up, so for its third-act revelation not only employs an attic and a basement, but also some old black-and-white photographs, a creepy child's doll and wheels out (literally) Insidious's Lin Shaye to explain the last sixty minutes and set up the next twenty five.
Ouija is a film for the chronically lazy.
Not as outright hateful as some of this year's horror flicks, the film is at least reasonably effective in what it does; the problem is that What It Does is lazily rehash every mid-budget horror made in the last 30 years. If this had been released straight to video in 1985 then it might have been good enough to make the grade.
But, y'know. It wasn't.
And, y'know. It isn't.
"And don't forget kids: messing around with makeshift spirit-boards invariably has bad consequences for the psychologically vulnerable, as this film goes to show!
There are a few nice shots in the film's climactic scenes, but that's pretty much it.
Oh Michael Bay's one of the film's producers, so it probably does, yes.
If anything, this is a DVD for a bunch of teenage girls to watch and shriek over.
I just might.
I just won't.
There just isn't.
How come when doe-eyed Laine is creeping around a dark attic with the torch/flash on her smartphone it illuminates a radius of approximately two feet, but when some fuckwit four rows in front of me checks their texts during the movie, the light from the screen alone makes the auditorium wallpaper visible?
*1"The connection's too strong, you won't be able to break it by destroying the board! Oh, but also, you've got to destroy the board."
*2 Nope. Not even fucking kidding. There's a plug for it in the film's end-credits. They've actually managed to top Battleship. Next stop, Hangman, I shouldn't wonder…
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
