By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Harmony Korine
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Isla Fisher, Snoop Dogg, Zac Efron, Martin Lawrence, Joshua Ritter, Stefania LaVie Owen and Jonah Hill.
Rating: Poor
Harmony Korine, Director of 2012´s “Springbreakers” brings “The Beach Bum”, a film that is a huge disappointment.
The story takes place in the Florida Keys and centers around Moondog (Matthew McConaughey) a poet and hippie that lives his life on making his own rules.
One day everything will change for Moondog when his excesses take a toll and he is arrested. He is forced by a judge to go in to rehab and clean himself or go and serve some time in prison. Now Moondog will either continue in his path of not following the rules or try to clean and redeem himself
“The Beach Bum” had all the potential to be a funny and comedic film but unfortunately that was not the case. This was thanks to the screenplay written by Harmony Korine, who created a character that is really vague. I´m aware that the main character is a burnout and a bum but at the course of the film I didn´t see any motivations for him and was redundant.
In any film regardless of the genre your characters need to have a change and I didn´t see it here and I feel that in 95 minutes nothing happened.
Matthew McConaughey´s performance was good and I do think that he did what he could in order to get a decent performance.
There were characters that they I never understood why they were in the movie; the case here it would be the Jonah Hill, who plays McConaughey´s literary agent in the film. Jonah Hill is one of the most talented young actors in this industry and here was completely wasted.
I feel the movie by moments wanted to be “The Big Lebowski” but it wasn´t even close. There were moments that I wanted to walk out of the theater when I watched this film but in a naïve way I gave the benefit of the doubt that the movie was going to be better at some point but I was wrong.
Harmony Korine´s direction was all over the place and so is his writing that I felt was very amateur. I think that he needed to invest more in the story and it´s characters for this film to make it work. If he would have done the work properly I believe that his film could have had an interesting result.
Overall “The Beach Bu” is one of the worst films of 2019 and I cannot recommend it due to the screenplay that was sloppy and I hope that Harmony Korine learns from this and can make a good film.