K-SCORE: 45
Writer/Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Blake Jenner, Zoey Deutch, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Glenn Powell, Wyatt Russell, Will Brittain, Juston Street, Dora Madison Burge
Spoiler Level: Unspoilable
“this movie has no central conflict whatsoever”
“No man alive should be able to claim to have seen the same scene of Everybody Wants Some!! twice.”
I feel a little bad for Richard Linklater. There are some aspects of Everybody Wants Some!! that indicate he’s onto something truly unique and brilliant. Sadly, what he’s doing isn’t storytelling and it’s not really filmmaking either. He’s in the wrong industry. The guy has just planted the seeds of a new form of entertainment that’s entirely different. It’s pseodorealistic subnarrative drollery. I felt the same way about Everybody Wants Some!! that I did about Dazed and Confused. It’s not a movie. There should be literally no end to the content given the way it flows together without purpose for solid blocks of time. This stuff should just be on somewhere at all times, looped in some clever way that no one can see. You hop in, follow the characters for a little bit, and hop out because they’re going nowhere and doing nothing significant. Watching for two hours is about double my irritation threshold in one sitting, but I could see myself enjoying it during the twenty odd minutes before dinner some nights or as something meaningless to watch before falling asleep. You throw it on, you laugh at the idiocy or the pranks or the shallow relationships, and you turn it off because you’re not harboring any delusions that any of it actually means anything. One or two takes should be the max for the film crew and they shouldn’t bother with editing. No man alive should be able to claim to have seen the same scene of Everybody Wants Some!! twice. Even if it did happen, they shouldn’t recognize it. It’d be like walking on the beach on summer day, picking up a random seashell, admiring it for a few seconds, then dropping it in the sand. The odds that you find the very same shell next year are terrible, and since it was an unremarkable moment the first time around, you wouldn’t remember even if you did stumble upon it again.
As a film, Everybody Wants Some!! is actually quite bad. There’s no central conflict whatsoever. Pick a start point, pick and end point, hit some scenes in the middle and then call final cut. That’s how Linklater made it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he rewrote the script on set based on which actors showed up to film that day. “Hey we have about two-thirds of the baseball team here today. Let’s do a scene in their house. Oh, it’s just you and you and you today? Well, I suppose we’ll have you walking down the street, meeting an old friend, and the… going to a heavy metal concert? Sure, why not? Oh we got that guy! Back to the disco club!” But watching those scenes back to back to back to back to back starts to make your brain hurt. The utter pointlessness of it seeps in through the cracks. From a strictly narrative stance, the only asset is that all the characters are in college, and yes, college does feature that amount of wasted time and that number of young people committed to their shallow pursuits of nothing. I imagine it did in the eighties and it’s only gotten worse since. But this movie has no central conflict whatsoever. Where other films might elect to make a whole relationship arc, meet, fall in love, fight, get back together, with its two main characters, Everybody Wants Some!! chooses not to. Where other films might elect to have a conflict regarding the baseball team’s season, their aspirations, their trials getting to the playoffs of final series of games or what-have-you, Everybody Wants Some!! chooses not to. Instead it features but a single scene where the characters actually play baseball, and it’s a practice. Where other films might have a theme of the college hijinx being at odds with the rules that were laid out at the beginning by the authority figure, people busted for drinking and fornicating, the university threatening to disassemble the team if they don’t get their act together, Everybody Wants Some!! chooses not to. Those rules are established, immediately broken, and then entirely forgotten. Where other films might attempt to link a conflict regarding academics with these aspiring athletes who are really just using the school as an institution to continue their baseball aspiration, Everybody Wants Some!! chooses not to, electing to feature no class time and to neither reward nor punish any character for their scholarly pursuits. At every turn, this film steers clear of conflict that could potentially lead to development of plot and character. It’s just an array of sometimes amusing tidbits following college baseball players in Texas in the eighties, and not particularly remarkable ones at that.
“not altogether terrible unless you accidentally watch too much of it”
If that’s the aspiration, then it really needs to seem endless. There should be a channel or a website that plays a crazy amount of footage of this stuff on loop, and it can just be… like… a thing. You know how some people watch The Bachorlette. Yeah, I don’t get why, but apparently it happens. They just turn it on, and it’s kind of… on. If that was Everybody Wants Some!!’s goal then it would be fine. Actually it’d be far better than shows like The Bachorlette because Richard Linklater is far better at capturing character realities and the realities of college. The super intense athlete who will throw a temper-tantrum when he loses at ping pong - yeah that guy’s real. I’ve met that guy. I’ve met a couple of him. The airhead bro who follows people around, living for parties with kegs, who says things like, “What are all these people doing here? I know what I’m doing here. I’m playing baseball. But like, what are all these people doing here?” as if it’s a genius revelation. That guy’s real too! I’ve also met that guy! But the movie isn’t realistic. It’s pseudorealistic, which is better in some ways. It’s slightly more fun or at least more palatable to watch these characters than if you just had a camera crew follow around actual college students. They make certain necessary adjustments, like, cleaning the house to the point where you can walk in it, and turning down the music in the club to the point where you can hear conversations, and mercy-cutting away from the theater kids’ play after a couple minutes instead of forcing you to endure four agonizing hours of drunken improv. Entertaining, interesting once for every hundred times it’s shrug-your-shoulders random, and not altogether terrible unless you accidentally watch too much of it.
I don’t want to bash Everybody Wants Some!! because its creator might be thirty years ahead of his time, even if he is making films set thirty years in the past. That said, this isn’t really a functioning movie.