The Birthday Cake - Vendetta di famiglia

I went into this movie knowing nothing and it was the first movie I watched in the theaters since the end of 2019. I only give it two stars because it is comically bad and I did get a morbid sense of amusement from how bad it was. The soundtrack conflicts with the images on screen often and there are these jarring guitar stings that come incrementally that blow your ears out. They got a cast with some names and it comes across as if they all only chose to do it on the condition that they only would have to show up for one day. It comes across as lazy and it also has a bunch of plot lines that never crescendo to anything, it just pads time. I don't know who this movie is for, but if you want a good laugh from a bad movie then this is the one for you.

Gio (Shiloh Fernandez) is bringing a birthday cake to a gathering of his family of criminals. His mother had made the cake special. His father died 10 years ago and the cake is dedicated to his late father's birthday.

I like the turn. It's a big swing. I appreciate big swings even if it ends in a foul ball. That's what we have here. The swing is hard and the effort is there. In the end, it's a close miss. With such a big turn, the movie needs to set it up better. Quite frankly, I had to rewatch the first part. First of all, the father is not set up at all. The audience may require some father son time. Second, Gio actually has little to do with the cake. It would be more compelling if he's the one who specialized the cake. It's more retroactively compelling. There are a lot of big acting talents here but they are not filling out the screen. The style is deliberate indie and those star power is somehow diminished. This is a near miss but sometimes, those can be interesting.

I decided to watch this movie because Penn Badgley. The movie was about a boy name Gio attending a celebration for his fathers 10th death anniversary at Mob boss Angelo house and he was responsible for bringing the yearly traditional cake his mother makes. On the other hand, his cousin Leo had everyone in the neighborhood looking for him because he got caught by the feds transporting drugs and world on the streets he was a rat. In my opinion, we needed more of a back story to why Gio's father was killed and what was the purpose behind Sophia killing the mob family ..

Fans of mafia movies will like Birthday Cake. It's a simple story, and it doesn't take long for you get invested in the main character, Gio. The cast is stacked with a bunch of talent, And I had a good time watching it.

The editing is a bit sketchy and the sound quality is atrocious. I had a hard time understanding the dialogue so I had to turn on the subtitles.

I mainly wanted to leave a review to score it fairly for those with an open mind. It's much better than a 3 or 4 out of 10 like IMDb has it scored. The talented cast alone makes it worth watching. Check it out.

A waste of a good cast. I'd love to see a breakdown of the economics behind this (i.e. How much it took for reputable actors to attach their names to this project).