Blake Jenner | Through the Shattered Lens

Ian Swan (Bruce Willis) is a famed bounty hunter who has spent the last ten years of his life pursuing an escaped fugitive who is wanted for the cold-blooded murder of four FBI men. Swan has tracked his prey to Hawaii but, when he’s shot and falls into the ocean, Swan is presumed dead. Swan’s long-estranged son, Ryan (Blake Jenner), comes to Hawaii to try to track down the man who killed his father. He meets up with Ian’s former partner, Robbie Cole (Stephen Dorff), and also the only cop on the island who cares about justice, Savannah (Praya Lundberg). Reluctantly, Cole works with Ryan and discovers that Ian’s shooting is somehow connected to a shady businessman named Arlene Buckley (John Travolta). A real estate developer, Buckley is working hard to elect a man named Kane (Branscombe Richmond) to the U.S. Senate. Buckley’s plan also involves taking control of a part of the Island that the natives call Paradise City. Got all that?

2022’s Paradise City has been advertised as being a John Travolta/Bruce Willis film but make no mistake. Neither Travolta nor Willis get much screen time, though they both make an impression in the limited time that they do have. Stephen Dorff manages to steal every scene in which he appears, playing Robbie as a well-meaning guy who can’t help but be kind of a screw-up. That said, Dorff really isn’t in that much of the film either. Instead, the main star of the film is Blake Jenner. Jenner has the blandly affable screen presence of a low-key frat boy. That worked for him when he was in films like Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! but it’s not exactly ideal for an action star. Whereas the best action stars feel as if they’re always ready for a fight, Jenner comes across as the guy who would be trusted to order the keg for the next party.

Instead of taking charge of the screen, Jenner finds himself overshadowed by the gorgeous Hawaiian scenery. Hawaii is the true star of Paradise City and, even when the film itself doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, Hawaii itself is always amazing to look at. In many ways, Paradise City feels like an extra-violent episode of Baywatch Hawaii. (The film’s Baywatch aesthetic is confirmed when Savannah wears a bikini to a crime scene.) Just as with that show, the beaches and the jungles and the waterfalls and the oceans are all so stunning that it’s tempting to give the film a pass on the fact that the plot never makes much sense and any genuine emotional stakes are pretty much non-existent.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to ignore the plot because, for a low-budget B-movie, Paradise City takes itself way too seriously. It’s one thing for Ryan to be estranged from his father. It’s another thing for the film to feature flashbacks to Ryan’s childhood, in which we discover firsthand that Ian never understood Ryan. It’s also one thing to make Buckley a family man. It’s another thing try to create a clumsy parallel between the way that Buckley is raising his son and the way that Ian raised Ryan. As opposed to films like Gasoline Alley or the Detective Knight films, Paradise City seems to be trying too hard to be something that it isn’t. Instead of just embracing its pulpy style and trying to entertain, the film is determined to tug at the audience’s heartstrings and make a statement about evil land developers. The film forgets that, sometimes, just being entertaining is the best thing that a film can be.

This was one of the last films that Bruce Willis made before it was announced that he would be retiring from acting. Watching the film, it’s easy to tell that a stand-in was used for most of Willis’s action scenes. When Willis delivers the majority of his lines, it’s hard not to miss the wiseguy energy that used to be his trademark. That said, when Willis is acting opposite Travolta and Dorff, he shows a bit of his old spark. The two scenes in which he confronts John Travolta are the best in the film. For a few minutes, he seems like the Bruce Willis who we all remember and it’s hard not to get a bit emotional watching two talented (if often underappreciated) actors acting opposite each other for what will probably be the last time.

Paradise City is not a particularly memorable film and the overly complicated plot is next to impossible to follow but I am happy that the cast and the crew got to hang out in Hawaii for a bit. It’s a lovely place to visit.

(For the past three weeks, Lisa Marie has been in the process of reviewing 56 back to school films! She’s promised the rest of the TSL staff that this project will finally wrap up by the end of today, so that she can devote her time to helping to prepare the site for its annual October horrorthon! Will she make it or will she fail, lose her administrator privileges, and end up writing listicles for Buzzfeed? Keep reading the site to find out!)

Well, here we are! It’s taken nearly four weeks but we have reached the conclusion of Back to School Part II! I started this series by taking a look at Teenage Devil Dolls. Along the way, I’ve reviewed everything from Andy Warhol’s Vinyl, A Clockwork Orange, Animal House, and Can’t Hardly Wait to Hollywood High and Keith. I’ve even found an excuse to review four different Degrassi films! I’ve had a lot of fun but, with October approaching, I’m happy to be finishing up this series of reviews so that I can concentrate on the TSL’s annual horrorthon!

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!

Everbody Wants Some!! generated a small flurry of excitement when it was first released back in March. Not only was it Linklater’s first narrative film since the critically acclaimed Boyhood but it was also advertised as being a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. Like Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! was a period piece that would follow an ensemble of Texas teenagers over the course of one long weekend, the big difference being that Everybody Wants Some!! would take place in 1980 (as opposed to 1976) and it would deal with college freshmen (instead of high school juniors). There were even a few articles that pointed out that several of the actors in Everybody Wants Some!! physically resembled some of the actors in Dazed and Confused.

(Seriously, Glen Powell looks like he could be Matthew McConaughey’s younger brother.)

The film was well-reviewed by critics, even though few of the reviews were as rapturous as the reviews that greeted previous Linklater films like Boyhood and Before Midnight. As for the audience reaction … well, Everybody Wants Some!! was not exactly embraced by audiences. I saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse and the theater was nearly deserted. (Considering that the Alamo’s audience prides itself on embracing independent film, a near-empty theater for a showing of a Linklater film is not a good sign.) The few people in the theater seemed to feel that the film went on for too long and that it needed a stronger plot. That’s a complaint that I’ve heard a lot of people make against Everybody Wants Some!!

It’s not a complaint that I agree with. Those who complained that Everybody Wants Some!! was essentially plotless obviously haven’t seen many Richard Linklater films. Though Linklater has made his share of commercial films, his more personal work — like Everybody Wants Some!! — is often plotless. That’s actually one the keys to Linklater’s aesthetic. He’s more interested in recreating a specific time and place and observing how different characters react to their environment than he is in telling conventional stories. A film like Everybody Wants Some!! is less about telling a story with a definite beginning and end and more about capturing a very specific experience.

And, on that level, the film definitely succeeds. Watching Everybody Wants Some!!, you literally do feel as if you’ve stepped into a time machine and you’ve been transported to the past. Jake (Blake Jenner), a college freshman who is attending fictional Southeast Texas College on a scholarship, may be the main character but, ultimately, he’s not that important. More important is seeing how people lived, interacted, and thought in 1980. Everybody Wants Some!! is a time capsule film.

(Apparently, it’s a bit of an autobiographical film as well. Cinema snobs like me tend to forget that, before he became a filmmaker, Linklater was a jock who, like Jake, attended college on a baseball scholarship. As much as we may not want to admit it, not all artistic geniuses spent high school writing angsty poetry about eating disorders. Some of them played sports.)

Everybody Wants Some!! follows Jake and his fellow baseball players over the course of the weekend before classes begin. One night, they end up in a redneck bar. Another night, they end up at a punk club. They go to a drama department party. They practice baseball. They all drink. Some of them smoke weed. Some of them get laid. And, at the end of the weekend, two of them sit down in their first class of the semester and promptly fall asleep.

One problem that I did have with Everybody Wants Some!! is that, as good as job as it does of creating a time and place, it didn’t necessarily convince me that it was a time in which I would want to live in. As I stated earlier, Everybody Wants Some!! was promoted as being a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. However, Dazed and Confused featured a greater variety of characters. Practically everyone of note in Everybody Wants Some!! is a member of the school’s baseball team. True, some of them are smarter than others. Some of them smoke weed. Some of them are ultra religious. But, ultimately, they’re all jocks and they’re all frat boys. How much you enjoy hanging out with these characters will depend on how much tolerance you have for jocks, frat boys, and their hyper-masculine rituals. Whenever I’ve seen Dazed and Confused, I’ve thought to myself that if I had been alive and in high school in 1976, I would have wanted to be friends with at least a few of the characters. On the other hand, if I had been alive and in college in 1980, I would have gone out of my way to avoid that baseball team.

(And, as a result, I probably would have missed a chance to meet Richard Linklater! There’s a lesson to be learned there.)

Ultimately, though, Everybody Wants Some!! succeeds because, even if the characters aren’t particularly likable, the film itself does capture the feeling and the excitement of having your entire future ahead of you. Admittedly, there’s a hint of melancholy running through the film. One character is revealed to be a 30-something imposter who regularly uses a false identity to enroll in different colleges because he loves to play baseball but he knows that he’ll never succeed in the major leagues. Throughout the film, there are hints that none of these baseball players are ever going to be as successful as they are during that one particular weekend. But, ultimately, the film tells us that the future doesn’t matter. What matters is that, for that one weekend, they had their entire future ahead of them and it seemed like anything was possible.

Everybody Wants Some!! may not be Linklater’s best but it definitely deserves to be seen!