Firecrackers

The movie begins on a promising note but fades into a nothing every passing minute. It is so directionless that you begin to wonder as to if the scriptwriter the director were either sleepy or drunk when they wrote and made the movie. Total piece of trash and such a waste of my Saturday evening. Wish I rather saw some trash on Netflix that would probably be more entertaining than this. Save yourself the trouble!!

The beginning ten minutes are strong, but the rest of the film does not go anywhere. And the main characters literally don't go anywhere either. It is slow, boring and frustrating. The two girls don't evoke any sympathies at all, which should be central to this plot.

If you're looking for a "teen movie" this is not it. Having said that, it is about teens with respect to the 2 main characters. A few reviewers said there is nothing disturbing about it and that the 2 leads don't elicit any empathy/sympathy....that mirrors the attitudes of many of the males in the movie towards them. If you don't have any empathy for them, you may want to examine your own attitudes.....which is what the director is getting us to do. Hurt people hurt people. We're all familiar with this expression.

The relationships between the young women and between Lou and her brother do show their humanity and, it is through them, along with their circumstances, that we come to feel something for them.

The filming is well done and features a fair bit of hand-held camera, tight angles, but without being overly obvious for the most part. The way it was filmed and the lighting help to convey the atmospheres of the varying moods and moments.

Don't watch it expecting some highly produced masterpiece or Hallmark production but it is a film worth watching.

And the.

Are two lead actresses (Evans, Kurimsky) have very limited acting backgrounds, but did well, perhaps because their roles as older teens not happy w/pretty much everything except each other (well, most of the time) were natural fits. An indicator of the turmoil & trouble they go through w/parents, boyfriends as they try to escape town is dialogue in which four letter obscenties & similar words comprise 40% of the screen time; add in others (mostly males) it jumps to about 60%. Setting was low income; low education, gritty in your face. Ending not clear, but seems that leaving doesn't remove the source of the problems.

Where to begin reviewing this disastrous film? First of all, do we really need another movie about kids acting badly? It's been over done, and done much better than this. The writing is absolutely atrocious. Nothing original here. And the dialogue. Is it "edgy" when the kids can't complete a sentence without using the F-bomb at least once?

The acting is pretty mediocre. Not terrible, just nothing out of the ordinary. And don't get me started on the camerawork. Okay, I'll start. It looks like it was filmed with an iPhone. I know, that's supposed to make it look slice-of-lifey. FAIL. Honestly it just makes it hard to watch

I could keep going but let me leave it at this. Once again, it got a 6.0 rating because friends and family boosted the ratings. That's petty obvious. I rarely quit a movie half way through but in this case I made an exception. What an epic waste of time.

--MovieJunkieMark.