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Tuesday, 25 July 2017
Movie Review: Good Kids (2016)
An end-of-high-school comedy, Good Kids is about 35 years behind the times.
Four brainy 18 year old friends who have emphasized academic achievement over having fun throughout their school years arrive at their final summer before college. Suddenly, they decide to let loose for a few weeks. Andy (Nicholas Braun) becomes a toy boy tennis pro servicing the sexual needs of club cougars, including Gabby (Ashley Judd). Nora (Zoey Deutch) seeks romance and starts a relationship with a 30 year old Australian man. Aspiring chef Spice (Israel Broussard) goes looking for a straightforward sexual release. And Lionel (Mateo Arias), better known as the "The Lion", starts experimenting with drugs.
As the previously good kids go wild, Andy realizes that he harbours feelings for Nora, but things get more complicated when his dishy online pal Danya (Tasie Lawrence) arrives for a visit from India.
Written and directed by Chris McCoy, Good Kids is astonishingly bad. Apparently oblivious that this sub-genre of sexual high jinx by high school kids was thoroughly chewed and spit out in the early to mid 1980s, Good Kids spends its entire running length in the putrid landfill of old garbage ideas. McCoy does not offer a single original reason for this film to exist, as his characters behave with plastic predictability and spout recycled dialogue on their way from one over-familiar situation to the next.
Kid caught naked in the open? Run-in with the local cops? Suddenly falling in love with a friend? Drugs impairing work? Clueless parents? An older man playing a teen for a fool? And the ever original final party that ends in a brawl? All the boxes are ticked as Good Kids revives one moribund cliche per scene with spiritless monotony.
Ashley Judd gets a couple of scenes as an oversexed rich bored wife looking for a cheap thrill with a teen, and it is sad to find a once-classy actress reduced to an appearance in this bilge. Elsewhere Zoey Deutch (daughter of Leah Thompson and director Howard Deutch) reveals hints that she deserves better material.
The Good Kids want to dabble with being bad, but instead stumble into thoroughly dreadful territory.
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Ashley Judd gets a couple of scenes as an oversexed rich bored wife looking for a cheap thrill with a teen, and it is sad to find a once-classy actress reduced to an appearance in this bilge. >> ashley judd is one of those actresses who should have blown up and had a bigger career, but for kiss the girls and heat, her other movie offerings have been wasteful and not worth shouting about.
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