HEFE'S REVIEW OF:
ADVENTURELAND (2009)

OPENING THOUGHTS

    I was really kind of excited to see this movie, the trailers painted this film to be a raunchy comedy from the director of Superbad, and to me, that sounded awesome. However, it was relevant after only a couple of scenes that this was not exactly accurate. I felt lied to, and below you will find the reasons why.

ACTING

    JESSE EISENBERG is not really much of a leading man, I have never been impressed with him. He is a shallow nervous little dude who pretty much is incapable of displaying any kind of emotion. I think that Michael Cera would have been a much better choice, he can play an awkward young guy better than anyone, and he can do it in an entertaining way. I would like to know whose dick this guy is sucking in order to land a role this big, but he must be good at it, because he is not good at acting.
    KRISTEN STEWART is proving once and for all that Twilight was no fluke, she is a really bad actress. She spends more time fiddling with her hair than she does emoting. One of the biggest reasons this movie failed was because she also is not worthy of a leading role, and when both people cast in the lead roles are not capable of hoisting the movie on their shoulders, you are left with nothing but a big giant crapstack.  The thing that really boggles my mind about both Stewart and Eisenberg is that not only are they both bad at acting, neither one could be described as attractive. How is it possible to succeed at acting without ability or looks? Has the world gone mad?!
    BILL HADER was the only part of this movie that I enjoyed, hell his mustache alone was admirable, however I think he had a combined total of seven minutes of screen time. So as much as I liked him, he was not around enough to really do anything to the film's overall rating. I will say though, the best scene in the film has to be when his character grabs a bat and chases off a crazed amusement park guest, I won't say anything else about it in case you want to watch the film, but trust me, it is funny.

DIRECTION AND SCRIPT

    GREG MOTTOLA wrote and directed this movie based on his own experiences working in the real Adventureland amusement park. Apparently his experiences were rather dull and boring, because this movie was exactly that. The pacing in this picture was awful, and the story was dull and seemed way to full of itself. Maybe this movie was just the victim of a bad advertising campaign, because the raunchy comedy I was expecting turned out to be a below average teen comedy. The thing that really boggled my mind is that usually most films try to make cuts to ensure they get a PG-13 rating because R rated films tend not to do well in theaters. The weird part about this film, is that this seemed like an innocent PG-13 rated movie that added a couple of "F-Bombs" in order to achieve an R rating so they could market it as raunchy. Needless to say that felt forced and unnecessary, kind of like everything else in this movie.

THE VERDICT

    If you know what to realistically expect from this film when you go into it, you might find a little more to enjoy in this movie than I did, but not much. The thing that hurt this film more than anything else was the fact that the two lead roles were played by actors who have no business playing that big of a part. Beyond that, everything about this movie down to the direction and the writing felt bland and boring. Which I suppose is a bit ironic, given that this movie is called Adventureland and the film is anything but.
 
 

RATING: D

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