Young. Wild. Free.

Saw this at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival

"Young. Wild. Free." is a story about a teenager struggling to provide for his younger siblings in Compton finds his life turned upside down when he's held at gunpoint by the girl of his dreams. The film clearly is an influence on 80s teen comedies and the works of John Hughes. However, despite the main two lead performances were pretty good, the overall film's execution felt flat and really bad.

The main narrative feels perfect for a cheesy romantic-teen-comedy scenario and this would have been fun but the unfunny humor, messy story and unlikeable characters were struggle to make what's good about this film. The direction goes all over the place as the direction doesn't have a clear way on what tone, style or feel the film wants to be. Despite two good lead performances, the other performances were really bad and the dialogue is pretty garbage. The dialogue was poorly written as there were words spoken from certain individuals that comes off as "people don't talk like that in real life" and none of the characters were interesting and were pretty unlikeable.

The production sets feel cheap and the third act kind of does a poor job on explaining the twist the film offers. Overall, it's not a very good film and it's one of the worst ones I have seen at Sundance.

Rating: D+