You Get Me (2017) - Movie Review

The plot: After a messy break-up with his girlfriend Alison (Halston Sage), Tyler (Taylor John Smith) ends up spending the rest of the weekend with the seductive Holly (Bella Thorne). However, after he sobers up from the experience, he makes up with Alison. Holly is not happy about this, and she’ll do anything to have Tyler all to herself. Anything.

Bless his little cotton socks, Taylor John Smith is trying to make the block of wood he’s been given into a real boy but, man, this is pathetic. He’s a cipher, not an actual human being, and when he isn’t just existing on-screen, he’s acting angry in a way that is far funnier than it’s supposed to be. Sage genuinely makes me miss her being a complete bitch in Before I Fall; at least there, she had actual agency as a character. Here, she exists solely as a character in conjunction with the leading man, basically being a prize for getting through the crazy. Hu-fucking-zzah! Thorne is probably the most capable actor here, and she does okay as the wanton temptress but as the black widow psychopath? Not so much. Taking her real-life renegade stylings into account, the fact that she comes across as this unengaging as the true psychotic at the heart of her character is more than a little troubling. Even more so after seeing her in The Babysitter and doing this same role brilliantly.

I could go further into the cast and shame everyone here, as none of the performances are particularly good, but I don’t have to. Just between the three main characters, we have literally everything wrong with this film. Well, that and the incredibly lame visuals. This whole thing is so washed-down and unexciting, even the scenes set in a nightclub, that feelings of danger or tension or feeling of any description, to be perfectly honest, don’t register. It doesn’t help that one of the three credited editors pulled a cheap trick early on in the film. Long story short, there’s a shot in the film that I’m guessing wasn’t long enough for the production’s needs; they get around this by, for a split second at the end of the shot, playing it in reverse. That’s Youtube level editing there and I honestly don’t know what’s worse: That being done or me being so bored by the production that I staring off into the background so that I could even notice it.

Anyway, tangent: What else is wrong with this thing? Well, for a ‘thriller’, it might make you yawn once or twice but that’s about as engaging as it gets. We have a male lead who doesn’t have any semblance of a personality, or really any other reason why people would fighting over the chance to have him, a love interest so lifeless that it feels like he’s with her out of complacency than any real sense of love, and a romantic third-wheel who has an entire film to be threatening and abjectly fails to do so. I’m honestly baffled at how much that last one got screwed up: Her character is so suspicious that even people in-universe suspect that something is up almost immediately, and yet she barely does anything to really warrant that reaction. She lies and gives someone an allergic reaction; truly, the makings of the next Norma Bates(!)

What makes all of this lameality feel even worse is that, in order to make this story work, this film had to do a lot to justify what we’re seeing. This kind of narrative, one that explicitly revolves around a guy and the two women who want him, is passé. Without a real sense of sensuality or danger or even an admission of wrongdoing on the part of the characters, this isn’t going to register as anything but gross. Well, we kind of get that with Tyler textually having to face the consequences for cheating on his girlfriend. Except not really, since Tyler doesn’t really learn anything. Oh, the film tries to make it out like he did, about how he was too busy “chasing a fantasy”, but it’s about as half-hearted as you can get. Not only does it really not make any sense in connection with the actual story, it feels like a desperate means to justify the fact that we’re seeing this same story again.

All in all, this has to be the toughest review I’ve had to write all month: That’s how much nothing there is in this heap. The acting is dull, the visuals are straight-up amateur hour, the tone doesn’t even come close to being tense or dangerous, and the writing is sub-par, even for a film with a premise this overused. This will likely be a good deal shorter than my usual writings, because there’s only so many ways I can say that this film is uninteresting. Well done, Awesomeness Films, for absolutely delivering on that try-hard of a studio name.