Adam Stater

If there was an option for 0 stars, I would have picked it. I was recommended to watch The Holdovers by a trusted family member, who said I would love it. They were wrong. The movie was genuinely bad. I kept on checking how much time was left in the movie so I could stop watching it. The actor who played Angus was so lackluster. He seemed to not make any acting choices himself and the “choices” his character made only happened because the director had told him to do it. As for the acting for the other characters, it was fine. But to say this was Paul Giamatti’s best is a gross overstatement. What is fundamentally wrong with this film is the directing and writing. Especially the writing. The characters never developed fully and the things we “found out” about them just seemed like dumb plot devices written in to make the characters more relatable. Why the hell did we get to know the other students that were holding over, and then they just left on a helicopter and we didn’t get any development from them. The scene where the kid wet the bed and Angus comforted him seemed to only be put in the film to show that angus has somewhat of a nice side, but then that relationship between the two never developed because the kid left. Although, when the story was at the point of it just being angus, the teacher, and the cook, it had potential. How will these three people who don’t get along be able to just that, in isolation. But then instead of keeping those stakes high with them being isolated, the story just completely got rid of that tension by having the characters go to Boston. And the whole plot involving Angus’ father when they acted like he was dead and then he was in fact in an insane asylum just felt very cliche to me. All in all, with an awful script and maybe even worse direction, this movie failed to entertain me whatsoever. The fact that this movie is getting Oscar buzz and received a 96% on rotten tomatoes genuinely baffled me. Did I see the same movie everyone else saw? Clearly I’m missing something because I don’t think I could say anything good about the movie. The characters were just so inconsistent and I didn’t feel attached or even cared about them. Watch Dead Poet Society instead if you want to watch a coming of age film. That movie has actual good writing.