Re-Review: Boyhood (2014)

Ugh, I've been meaning to get this off my chest since I sat down and actually thought about this movie. The more I thought about it, the more angry I got about the film and the more I grew to dislike it.

So here's my NEW review for Boyhood and one that is considerably more negative and generally snappy and nasty. So yeah. Please note that I actually 'censored' the review, since this was originally an answer a question on tumblr, and hence had a looser style of language. It reads like an angry rant because it IS an angry rant. So apologies.
Boyhood is a film by director Richard Linklater that is supposed to tell the story of a boy over the course of twelve years.

The problem is that the film is paced like molasses, nothing of consequence happens and the characters learn nothing. Instead we get a bunch of random vignettes that honestly feel like a dozen separate stories copy-pasted together to stretch out to three hours.
The direction is bland, with no real camera movement or style to it at all, and most of the performances (with the exception of Ethan Hawke) are flat and/or stereotypical. Plot threads are raised only to be dropped, the dialogue is meandering and trite, and it says nothing either about the American family or how the events of the main character’s life or the overall 2000s (stuff like Katrina or the Iraq War or the housing crisis anything man) might influence the main character’s life. Instead he just grows up to be yet another aimless, John Green-styled self-righteous hipster who drops mushrooms and wanders around the desert with his stoner friends while building no meaningful relationships with anybody.

His mother is irresponsible, marrying three different men in the space of less then 15 years, with only Ethan Hawke’s character being anything resembling a proper father and even he was once a slacker before he got his shit together, remarried and now has a family of his own and is actually fucking responsible. She marries an abusive monster based on an immature student-teacher crush thing, and then leaves the bastard with his own two kids (we never find out what happens to the abusive father’s own children). She then goes on to marry a war vet who turns out to ALSO be an alcoholic asshole with PTSD, but that’s never touched on and next time we cut back to her, she’s divorced him. No commentary on the plight and difficulties many PTSD affected soldiers go through. Nope, he’s just a one dimensional bag of dicks.

Also, the main character’s sister is one of the most deplorable, despicable and downright bitchy pieces of shit I’ve ever had the displeasure of watching. I don’t care that she’s a modern American teenager, she’s still a shitty little brat who needs to get a fucking life and stop being such a piece of shit. She never learns or changes either. She’s just a stupid little bitch of a girl whose always mocking authority and her brother, for no reason other then her just being bitchy. Doesn’t help that the role is played by the director’s daughter, which screams of nepotism since she can’t even fucking act that well anyways. Oh! And neither can the main character either. He’s fine in the first half or so of the movie, but once he hits the age of 16 or so, his acting skills dropped faster then a ton of bricks.

So yeah, that’s what Boyhood is. A pretentious, self-righteous, indulgent three hour film that says nothing about anything at all, be it the state of America or the state of the modern American family.

Otherwise known as a total fucking waste of your time. Ethan Hawke was the ONLY good thing in it.

Half a star out of Five. Not even Ethan Hawke could save it.