K-SCORE: 39
Director: Jake Schreier
Based on: Paper Towns by John Green
Starring: Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, Halston Sage, Austin Abrams, Justin Smith
Spoiler Level: Major
“nothing valuable or interesting”
Paper Towns has the minor problem that almost nothing happens. Usually high school films are light on meaty content. This one is really light. The good news is they did a fair job at capturing the real boredom associated with a drive from Orlando to upstate New York. Instead of silly hijinks, sexual awakenings, and dramatic speeches about kings and queens, the prom depicted in Paper Towns just has some awkward dancing, which again means it captures the realism of the experience of going to a high school prom. The big party at the cool kid’s house features more vomiting and crying alone in the bathtub than it does skinny-dipping in the pool. And the complex hot girl at the center of the conflict is really just a selfish bitch. So it’s devoted to authenticity through and through.
There were times that I laughed at the dynamic of the three male leads, especially at their choice of random song to sing in the abandoned building where there was nothing valuable or interesting that for some reason they found scary. And the message is nice: that the experience you share with the ones who take the journey with you is more important than the one who makes you crazy enough to take the journey in the first place. Though it is undermined by the problem that Q, the lead, fails to tell Margo, the girl hiding in a paper town, that she was wrong about her best friend Lacey betraying her trust in the beginning. It was the primary reason Lacey went with him on that long drive. He was so obsessed with his own message to Margo that he forgot about his new friend’s.
I should have known this movie wouldn’t be that great though. It’s clearly a prequel to another film where almost nothing happens: Suicide Squad. Want to know what becomes of Margo Roth Spiegelman?
