Film should come with free beer to help you get through it

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME !!, but whether you want this banana peel depends on how hard up you are for laughs. When it came out in 2016, it carried expectations that writer-director Richard Linklater would slam another home run like his 1993 classic Dazed And Confused, particularly since this period comedy held buzz that it was basically a kindred successor to the earlier hoot. Theme wise, yep: as before it’s semi-autobiographical, with another clutch of Texas-based students out for a good time. Set seven years after the Dazed high school graffiti, college beckons, the siren lure of sex pursuits dictating curriculum. The mostly good-natured people who were Confused have now been replaced by a squad of jocular jocks, except the jokes fall flat, the behavior feels synthetic, is bereft of charm and the characters leave you deflated. One of its coterie of insular, party animal clods succinctly sums up the whole vapid, aggressively juvenile enterprise: “I’m too philosophical for this shit!”

The look you’ll receive from girlfriend or wife if you subject them to this boy’s club

At the tail end of August, 1980, a group of college baseball players meet, bond, practice and party, emphasis on the latter. A few are cocky freshmen, the rest cockier upperclassmen. As to class, the attending thereof, let alone the display of much, they foul out. On an estimable scorecard that includes triple plays like Before Sunrise, Fast Food Nation, School Of Rock, Waking Life and Boyhood, let alone the holy smoker D&C, this time up to bat Linklater swings and misses by a Porky‘s mile.

Illustrating the overall vibe

The fresh-to-the-game actors are okay, though none engage with the easy brio that made stars out of a number of the newcomers in Dazed and Confused. There are a few good lines scattered around, but not nearly enough to make hanging out with such arrogant, vacuous characters a pleasant way to use up 117 minutes. Some decent oldies on the soundtrack and a bunch of jerkwads on the screen. Fazed and Refused.

Psycho-dick on the left is simply hateful

Most critics gave it a pass: we’re in the minority on this dud. Moneywise, it flopped, 188th place in 2016, a price tag of $10,000,000 chewing up a domestic gross of $3,400,278, with $2,036,848  taken abroad.

The actors include Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, Zoey Deutch, Tyler Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, Austin Amelio, Justin Street, Will Brittain, Ryan Guzman, Temple Baker, J. Quentin Johnson.

How can she resist such transparent sincerity?