FilmSnobReviews

Title: Dude
MPAA Rating: TV-MA
Director: Olivia Milch
Starring: Lucy Hale, Kathryn Prescott, Alexandra Shipp
Runtime: 1 hr 37 mins

What It Is: Four best friends Lily (Hale), Chloe (Prescott), Amelia (Shipp), and Rebecca (Awkwafina) enjoy few things in life. Good conversation, good weed and accomplishing things, particularly in Lily’s case. As the anniversary of a tragedy which cost Chloe her brother and Lily the love of her life, it’s hard to deal with and this stress is exasperated by Lily having to maintain her duties as student body President. Between getting the prom together and keeping her grades up thing get a bit out of control.

What We Think: This is pretty bad. Most of the script is so old hat. The dialogue so bad. Quick note, Lucy Hale has yet to impress me in literally anything. That streak remains intact. Nothing that happens here is good. Narratively it’s boring and very blah blah blah. It’s a slice of life that isn’t believable in the least bit. All these girls seem like caricatures of real people. The major tragedy is literally only used when the script calls for us to be manipulated by this. It doesn’t work, despite a valiant effort by the director and screenwriter to get something out of us.

Our Grade: D, Yeah after a couple of excellent efforts (FINALLY) in 6 Balloons and Happy Anniversary those films this is not. I can’t recommend this at all, mainly because it isn’t good but also because it’s fairly terrible in almost every sense of filmmaking. It’s a film that will have you repeating the title utterance as a question. Wondering to yourself “dude why’d I watch this?” Good luck figuring this answer out. Also, let’s hope that this is just a small misstep for the larger picture of what Netflix is trying to do with films.