You Get Me (2017)
Starring Bella Thorne, Halston Sage, Taylor John Smith, Brigid Brannagh
Directed by Brent Bonacorso
You Get Me is the fidget spinner of Fatal Attraction clones. It moves without any sense of purpose and hopes you’re so easily amused you’ll just sit there and watch it do nothing in particular.
The Lifetime Network cranks out thrillers of this nature nearly every damn week, and I’m willing to bet most of them are more ambitious than this lazy affair that never tries to do anything more than the bare minimum and can’t even do that much in an entertaining fashion. Too tame to be salacious. Too lame to even be unintentionally funny. Virtually nothing noteworthy occurs for 89 minutes (that feel much longer).
“Love makes you do strange things” is the opening line delivered by teenage Tyler (Taylor John Smith, who, between his blonde hair, blue eyes, and perfect abs, looks like a model for the Abercrombie & Fitch “Hitler Youth Edition” catalogue). Those strange things include taking a yoga class with his girlfriend, Ali (the criminally wasted Halston Sage), and… ummm… actually, that’s about all the movie ever really establishes between these two. That and they haven’t had sex yet because she wants them to wait. We do know they’re in love because that’s also something he tells in voiceover and not because they actually have an ounce of screen chemistry.
For all I know this young man could be the next Daniel Day-Lewis, but in this movie he may as well be a corpse operated Weekend at Bernie’s style to achieve the effect of actual acting. A total blank slate who delivers nearly every line of dialogue with an automaton monotone except when he’s either whining or angry. Tyler is like a teenage Christian Grey version of The Terminator: a self-absorbed robotic red flag devoid of personality that any woman would never give the time of day to if not for him looking like a male model.
The moment Ali bumps into an old guy friend at a party who tries getting a little too chummy-feely with her, then messes with Tyler by telling him all about how she used to be not so innocent, shall we say, Tyler blows up not so much at the guy that had called into question her honor so much as he lays into Ali for not letting him get laid. At no point does he stop to let the woman he supposedly loves have a chance to respond to what this guy was insinuating. Instead he takes what the guy said as truth and immediately begins slut-shaming her, angrily whining, practically on the verge of tears, because she would give it up to other guys but not to him. This makes for even more of a weird double standard because it had already been established by some of his friends that prior to meeting her, Tyler himself was quite the womanizing playboy.
Like any sane person, she breaks up with him on the spot.
Tyler immediately hooks up with bad girl Holly (the quite possibly actually wasted Bella Thorne) for a night of ecstasy-fueled sex. Followed by another day of breaking-and-entering a stranger’s home for sex. They got it on more than once so he can’t just blame it on the pills.
Keep in mind that this guy is the protagonist of the film. This is the guy the movie expects us to be cheering for to make things right, get back together with the good girl he supposedly loves, and save her from the psycho girl he hooked up with the second things didn’t go his way so they can live vapidly ever after. He’s not a flawed hero. He’s a douchebag.
But wait… it gets worse. After hooking up with the mentally unbalanced seductress, Ali informs Tyler that they need to talk.
You Get Me really should have been called We Need to Talk because that line gets texted repeatedly throughout the film.
Their talk consists of – wait for it, wait for it – Ali apologizing to Tyler. Let me repeat that: SHE APOLOGIZES TO HIM! Why? Because, as she tells him, she used to be really wild and out of control and has been trying to turn her life around and really should have told him about her sordid past.
Are you kidding me?
I can only imagine any woman reading this script and groaning mightily, especially Sage, whose Ali is written to be a next-level ninny.
There’s a scene where Holly confronts Tyler for being a lying, two-faced, self-absorbed jerk that used her, dumped her, and thinks he can just go right back to Ali without any consequences for his actions. What she said was so on the money I was confused as to whom I was supposed to be rooting for. The filmmakers didn’t have the guts to go with that angle because everything about this movie is superficial to the nth degree.
In fact, the actor playing Tyler has more chemistry with Thorne during their hook-up scenes than he ever does with Sage. She really does seem to get him, as the title implies. If the movie had flipped things and made it so that the good girl was actually the bad girl tormenting the ex and his sidepiece, then they might have actually had something. What we got was a boring thriller that doesn’t seem to know how to properly go about being a thriller about a pretty boy prick and his dimwit lady love contending with an unconvincing villainess who barely does anything vaguely threatening until the final moments of the film.
By the way, what kind of parent realizes their kid is out of control with sex and partying and decides the best way to deal with this is to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles? Sex and partying, that never happens in L.A. This friggin’ movie…
After agreeing to not keep any secrets from each other (i.e., he does not tell her he hooked up with a hot redhead), obsessed schizoid Holly arrives at their high school and begins messing with Tyler and Ali in the blandest ways possible.
Watch Holly make out with another guy while staring directly at Tyler as Ali watches on completely clueless.
Witness the tension-less terror as Holly shows up at Tyler’s house unnanounced and has breakfast with his kid sister.
Be on the edge of your seat as Holly and Ali lounge around the pool trying to see how hard and fast they can flunk the Bechdel test.
A solid 45 minutes of nothingness goes by before the movie realizes that maybe it should have Holly do something truly dangerous. One of Ali’s friends tells her about trying to find info about Holly online and coming up with nothing. The very next second (not an exaggeration of time), Holly poisons the girl’s drink. Holly didn’t hear that conversation. How did Holly know she even needed to do this? Was she psychic? Did she read the script?
There’s really no point in going on. You Get Me is a poorly executed cliche-a-thon so lazy and lifeless it makes The Roommate from a couple of years ago look positively Hitchcockian. Millennials deserve their own Fatal Attraction. This is not it. This is not anything.
You Get Me is currently streaming on Netflix. Surely you can find something better to watch on Netflix.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
