Dude

I've had the feeling for some time now that with a bit of luck, Lucy Hale could belong to the talented new generation, and I'm dead certain of it with Kathryn Prescott. Their joint involvement in the dramedy genre meant an obligation for me because Netflix has a nice lineup of "postponed" films in its repertoire, a collection where a few true gems lie hidden, waiting to be found. And yet Dude isn't one of them. Its fatal flaw is genre imbalance and the inability to decide when to be dramatic and when to be funny. Sometimes even I myself have no idea which string Olivia Milch wanted to play (masturbation in restrooms, addictive substances in the car), and out of all of it I ended up feeling confused more than anything else. The movie also cuts things off at the stem by unnecessarily introducing a serious topic (the bedroom episode with Mike) but treating it rather poorly, and fails even to properly light up such a clear warning sign. It only successfully wraps up one of the storylines; fortunately, the most important one. By the end I believed every word of all the relevant participants about coping with the loss of a loved one and accepting one's own grief, and with the possible exception of those moments related to Thomas and longing for what was and contemplating what might have been, I believed that there must have actually been girls living like somewhere, sometime. (22.05.2018)