The Fight Before Christmas: TANGERINE

Tangerine lights up and takes off in the first scene and doesn’t stop to take more than one breath until right before the end credits. It’s set on a stretch of West Hollywood populated with fast food, car washes, bus stops, strip malls, and prostitutes, where we find our leads, two transwomen. Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are best friends and sex workers. While they share a donut to celebrate Christmas Eve, Sin-Dee learns her boyfriend/pimp (James Ransone) cheated on her while she was briefly imprisoned. This will not stand. So off she runs in pursuit of her man and the woman (Mickey O’Hagan) who slept with him. Sin-Dee is intent on revenge, while her friend follows along trying to talk her down. Writer-director Sean Baker whips up a whirlwind of activity, loud and hilarious, in a movie that’s humane and alive, crackling with tremendous energy and vitality.

It’s everything independent cinema should be, inventive filmmaking bursting with casual diversity and representing a point of view rarely explored. It’s perfectly cast with charismatic and compelling fresh faces, and expertly written in bursts of overlapping colloquial dialogue and staccato humor, the plot a raucous tightly plotted crescendo. Best of all, it’s gorgeously directed, with sumptuous widescreen digital photography. You’d never know it was captured on an iPhone, shaming the bland digital look of so many big budget films. Every shot is framed for forceful impact. Baker, with co-cinematographer Radium Cheung (who works on one of TV’s best looking shows, The Americans) creates a rich color palate – dripping in vibrant yellows and reds, bathed in golden caramel oranges – and beautiful texture, imbued with a constant charge of movement, following closely behind the boisterous proceedings.

There are swooping angles and emphatic movement, and a booming soundtrack (of hip-hop, classical, and carols), a sense of forward momentum and riotous entertainment to go with the sharply observed character and place. At the center of this loud, hard-charging comedy is a tender friendship. Sin-Dee and Alexandra are two of the most extraordinary characters in recent memory. They’re tough and hilarious, full of big dreams and fully aware of dangers and prejudices. They’re capable and vulnerable, serious and goofy, and they genuinely enjoy their time together, even though the course of events here tests their loyalty and support. They have their differences. Taylor is a great solid center around which Rodriguez can spin. It’s a good contrast. Taylor is a magnetic draw of quiet charisma, an anchor for the intensity around her. Rodriguez is more of clever charisma bomb, tearing through every scene with a quick wit, perfect timing, and a sharp argumentative edge.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, eager to see what they’d do and say next. Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch give them great scenarios. Separately or together they spend time fighting on a bus, barging into a hotel room, taking drugs, creatively using a car wash for privacy, arguing with a would-be john, and stopping at a bar to sing Christmas carols. But it’s the acting that breathes such captivating humanity into their every moment. What could’ve been a flip crime comedy – like every other post-Tarantino 90’s indie – is instead soulful and involving excitement connecting characters who feel completely real and alive. This extends to supporting roles, including a subplot involving an Armenian cab driver (Karren Kartagulian) whose involvement with the main throughline goes in some unexpected directions before reaching an ambiguous, surprising, and kind conclusion.

For a movie provocative in many ways – in vulgarity, frank sexuality, even its loudness – it has this core of kindness. Baker has compassion for every character, and creates a non-judgmental energy that allows them their identity without feeling a need to comment upon it. In an exuberantly dirty fast-paced character comedy, there’s a feeling of matter-of-fact lived experience that’s refreshing. Without dipping into cliché, it’s a message of tolerance. The film is aware of problems involving transphobia and issues of class and prejudice, but never becomes a hectoring or moralizing movie. It’s too open-minded and humane, and too focused on its high-energy, fast-tempo comedy to preach. Baker’s a smart enough filmmaker, and his cast is relaxed enough, to imbed Tangerine’s ideas in outrageously entertaining energy. We follow our leads over the course of one crazy day, overlapping arguments and conflicts building to a dizzying emotional climax, then falling into a hard-fought quiet. As hilarious as it is heartfelt, this is a great argument for telling stories from diverse perspectives.

On the Road Again: VACATION

At least Vacation, the Harold Ramis-directed/John Hughes-scripted movie from 1983, started with a simple comic premise lampooning bad family car trips. By the time we reach the new combination remake/sequel Vacation, coming after three theatrical sequels and a direct-to-video spinoff, it starts to seem less like a relatable goof and more like a cruel punishment. Every member of the Griswold family is apparently doomed to a life of horrible vacations. If you have one terrible trip, you’ve had a terrible trip. But if you only have terrible trips, it must be you. At least a straightforward remake could’ve regained the original concept’s small charms. Maybe instead of this two-in-one reboot, what we really need is a prequel in which we finally learn how patriarch Gus Griswold insulted whichever warlock gave his family this curse.

The new Vacation is a podgy road trip swollen with an uneven collection of pit stops. The story goes like this. Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms) remembers fondly the great vacation his parents (Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo) took him on 32 years ago. So he wants to recreate it with his wife (Christina Applegate) and sons (Skyler Gisondo and Steele Stebbins). Misadventures ensue on their way from Illinois to California where Wally World awaits. It’s both the same, and different, making it the Jurassic World of comedies, right down to the endless repetition of the original’s main theme, unimpressive special effects, and characters who have an odd affection for decades-old events that within their world would’ve been inescapably scarring.

But that’s nothing that couldn’t be overcome with good jokes. I should have known writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, the screenwriters behind last year’s execrable Horrible Bosses 2, might not be up to the task. At least it’s not that bad. Every stop on the trip heads straight into cameos, in which funny people step into the picture for a brief moment and make it almost watchable. You can’t throw Keegan-Michael Key, Regina Hall, Leslie Mann, Chris Hemsworth, and Charlie Day into a movie and not have at least a few smile-worthy moments. Of the main cast, only Applegate got a laugh out of me. It’s supposed to be funny that the Griswolds are mostly oblivious, a bit rude, gullible, prone to bad decisions and saying awkward things, like when they mistakenly think slang for a sex act means a chaste kiss. A little of this family goes a long way.

Some scenes are mildly amusing, like their car’s confusing features, a man who doesn’t know there’s a rat on his shoulder, and a territorial dispute among police officers at the Four Corners Monument. But many scenes are consistently misjudged. Its dirtiness feels crass, dark humor plays sour, slapstick is just unpleasant, and gross out gags are only gross. If you think the idea of a grown woman face down in a puddle of vomit on a sorority house lawn, or a family mistaking a lagoon of human waste for a hot spring, a steer munching on gory cow viscera, or a woman in a convertible killed in a head on collision with a semi are funny ideas, go for it. There’s a lot more where those came from. It’s not actively hateful like the worst R-rated comedies, but there’s a low-level grinding lazy nastiness that leaves a bad taste. Worst, though, is the way it’s just regurgitated garbage, a copy of a copy of a copy of an original that was merely half-decent to begin with.

Choose to Accept It: MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE-ROGUE NATION

An efficient and engaging thrill machine, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is further proof Tom Cruise’s signature franchise is one of the most consistently high-quality adventure series we’ve ever had. It accomplishes this by delivering strongly on a set of appealing and entertaining recurring excitements – vertiginous stunts, complicated heists, amusing spy gadgets, convincing masks, and dastardly double crosses. But no matter how cleverly the filmmakers deploy these elements, the glue holding them together is Cruise himself, racing along with hard-charging star charisma born out of hard-working determination motoring a constant forward momentum. Much has been made about his running, in which he appears to throw every ounce of his being into a hurtling mad dash across the frame. If anyone could accomplish the impossible, it would be his Ethan Hunt.

With appealing action and a megawatt star, the franchise has an ability to allow each director to play to his strengths. The result is a series of five films with a welcome familiarity in its recombination of its best parts, and yet never grows too repetitive. Each entry has its own flavor. De Palma first brought complicated pulp, then Woo had swooning balletic action, Abrams injected throat-grabbing emotional stakes, and Bird performed a juggling act of buoyant one-thing-after-another action. Now writer-director Christopher McQuarrie has the reigns, steering an endlessly enjoyable action movie into his twisty construction and clever control. He brings the mystery and the weighty violence of his last film, Jack Reacher (an underrated Cruise vehicle), and the shifting allegiances and slow realizations of his first script, The Usual Suspects.

Once more, the milieu of Ethan Hunt and the agents of the secret Impossible Missions Force is familiar, but the tone has something new. Unlike madcap MacGuffin chases of the last few entries, Rogue Nation plunges us into spy movie mechanics, with shady dealings and uneasy alliances. In D.C., the new head of the CIA (Alec Baldwin) talks a confidential Senate hearing into dissolving the IMF, using the near-miss missile and smoldering Kremlin from Ghost Protocol as his evidence. This leaves familiar faces (Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames) behind desks, while Hunt (Tom Cruise) disobeys orders by staying in the field. He finds himself in hiding, trying to track down The Syndicate, a terrorist organization only he seems to know about. Connecting isolated tragedies with a conspiratorial mind, he seems crazy to the CIA, who are desperate to hunt him down and take him in.

But because an early scene sees an unknown bespectacled Brit (Sean Harris) gun down an IMF agent and attempt to kill Hunt, who barely escapes thanks to a mysterious woman (Rebecca Ferguson) and her helpful punches, it’s easy to see he’s right. So he’s on a globetrotting chase away from the CIA while attempting to track down proof of the group to clear his name, and then take them down and save the world. McQuarrie keeps things ambiguous. What is The Syndicate? Who is the Brit and the woman? What’s the IMF’s role? All is answered in sensationally staged setpieces pleasingly varied and orchestrated. Instead of the usual action beats strung along by rote connective tissue, they grow thrillingly out of an involving set of mysteries and complications. It never overwhelms or exhausts, maintaining consistently pleasing tension and thrills.

Rogue Nation is structured as a nesting doll of action, each setpiece a more compact, concentrated, and intricately designed moment than the last. It starts with big, grinning, highflying stunts, before narrowing through heists and car chases to close on bruising one-on-one combat. The movie moves quickly, enjoying a good one-liner or a perfectly timed look of skepticism just as much as it does putting Cruise on the side of a plane during takeoff, tossing him down an artificial waterfall, throwing him through a plate-glass window, and rolling his car end over end. The action is satisfying, bright, clear images (from cinematographer Robert Elswit) whipped up with crisp cross-cutting and elegant design. A gorgeously designed sequence set around an opera house backstage and on catwalks during a performance is one of the series’ best, with other highlights here including a high-velocity motorcycle chase down a desert highway, a trembling time-bomb bluff, and shootouts and knife fights kept PG-13 despite teeth-rattling sound effects.

McQuarrie stages these thrilling moments with the oomph of impact and the elegance of clockwork construction. But he never loses sight of the human-level interpersonal drivers behind the chaos. This allows Tom Cruise’s intense determination and eager motion to take appealing center stage while the terrific ensemble is allowed to be simultaneously essential team members and great comic relief, fun without diluting seriousness. (Best may be Baldwin, as a serious obstacle cut with a bit of Jack Donaghy bluster.) Meanwhile, Ferguson is great new character, complicated and an unknowable variable. Is she a foil, prey, a secret help, or a manipulative mastermind? It’s fun guessing, but even better is the realization she’s Hunt’s equal (or better, in some ways). If she’s an ally, they’re in luck. But if she’s out to destroy them, she just might win.

Running an unbelievably brisk 131 minutes, Rogue Nation is stuffed with excitement manipulated efficiently. McQuarrie and his team get just about everything possible out of each action sequence without overstaying their welcome. There’s no need to have a perfunctory car chase when it can drive the plot forward while adding participants and obstacles cleverly colliding and careening throughout. Each setpiece is wrung for all its worth, but stops where it can still leave the audience begging for more, as the characters regroup for their next move. McQuarrie understands the appeal of a blockbuster action movie at its best, marrying a fine ensemble with elaborate special effects in a tightly plotted machine delivering everything you’d want and a little more, too. The Lalo Schifrin theme has become big-budget action cinema’s most reliable sound. You can lean back sure that whatever happens next will be hugely enjoyable.

Elementary, Dear MR. HOLMES

Sherlock Holmes is literature’s great noticer, wise for his powers of perception and logical reasoning. His long legacy of imitators – basically every detective since 1887 – can’t quite match him for suis generis deduction. Unlike some mysteries where you can feel the author stacking the deck in their lead’s favor with arbitrary observations leading to a solution, there’s something authentic about the original Holmes stories’ satisfying logic. I’ve always found them to contain a near supernatural sense that Holmes would be able to solve any mystery, not for any great leaps of intuition, but for his ability to process and interpret information. But what author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle giveth, director Bill Condon taketh away in Mr. Holmes, a slow, poignant meditation on aging that finds the great detective near the end of his life.

This film finds a good new perspective on an oft-adapted character. Its greatest mystery is his memory, as a 93-year-old Holmes (Ian McKellen, aged with convincing makeup and frail physicality) deals with his declining abilities decades after his retirement. It’s the late 1940s. He’s now a lonely old man. Watson and Mycroft are gone, as is his Baker Street home. Instead he lives near the sea in a distant country home with only his buzzing apiary, his stern housekeeper (Laura Linney), and her precocious boy (Milo Parker) to keep him company. Facing creeping senility, his memory is fading, and his mental agility has slowed. It bothers him. The very thing that made him useful, from which he derived his purpose and his fame, was his mind. What to do now that the most troubling unknowns he must puzzle out on a daily basis are names and places?

Screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher, adapting a novel by Mitch Cullin, juggles three plotlines, as Holmes finds his mind drawn to his final case. He can’t quite remember the details, something about a man (Patrick Kennedy) worried about his wife (Hattie Morahan), but wants to write down what he can before he forgets entirely. All he knows is that it ended in a way that convinced him to retire. We’re drawn back into these flashbacks where a sprightlier McKellen puts a bounce in his step and a twinkle in his eye to play Holmes in his prime, which makes the sight of the stooped, slowed man in the film’s present all the more affecting. Interspersed with these two timelines are glimpses of a post-World War II trip to Japan where Holmes met with a man (Hiroyuki Sanada) who promises to help him find a plant to help stave off dementia.

The way these plotlines interact is confused, and never quite reaches a satisfying convergence. But holding it together is Condon’s smooth and soft approach, which frames period detail in a comfortably handsome structure, emphasizing crisp British Masterpiece Theater subtlety and sturdy empathy. Best of all is Condon's focus on McKellen (the director and star of Gods and Monsters reunited) and his tremendous performance. The great actor capably plays different stages of Holmes life, both an aging charmer and a man dragged back into memory while still trying to be of some use. He lets us see every bit of the younger Holmes we know filtering through the older man's countenance, sparkling animated eyes in a dignified wrinkled face. In the film’s best subplot, he forms a warm, wonderful grandfatherly relationship with the housekeeper’s son. The boy is eager to learn from the great man he’s read about and whom he admires, and Holmes is happy to find someone who he can engage intellectually. It’s a sweet intergenerational friendship, where the young and the old bond over shared passions for learning, thinking, a sense of discovery, and mystery.

Mr. Holmes is a tenderly felt and delicately wrought film, crackling with a delightful lead performance, relaxed and complex. For a man defined by his intellect, it’s important to maintain his sense of educated perception. That’s what makes his mental slippage so devastating, something he fights against and tries to ignore. It speaks to a desire to stand near the end and look back into one’s life, trying to make sense of it while looking forward to the legacy one hopes to leave behind. The film compassionately imagines a graceful and wistful twilight for the great Sherlock Holmes, finding small surprises and resonant emotional detail in a man who has left his life’s vocation behind him but can’t stop noticing, piecing together old memories while forging new ones in the hopes of still being able to make a difference in another’s life.

Fight Night: SOUTHPAW

I suppose it was inevitable Antoine Fuqua would direct a boxing picture. The one thing that connects his diverse (and uneven) filmography – from fine genre fare like Training Day and King Arthur to lesser junk like Olympus Has Fallen and The Equalizer – is intense, gory, bruising violence. So when an early shot in Southpaw has Jake Gyllenhaal looking straight into the camera, howling in slow motion as blood and sweat rain off his straining muscles, it’s clear we’re in a place of macho intensity. Fuqua shoots the boxing matches with reasonable force, and wisely uses the camera to teach the audience how to read the strategies involved. But the story between the bouts is merely programmatic, a broad and bludgeoning collection of tropes. It’s a boxing picture. What do you want, a roadmap?

It starts with Gyllenhaal’s boxer at the top of his game – undefeated, even. Soon, he’s fallen on hard times due to a set of tragic circumstances and his own bad habits – temper, alcohol, and so on. He loses his wife (Rachel McAdams), is abandoned by his sleazy manager (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), and has his daughter (Oona Laurence) taken away. Now he has to rely on a tough-but-fair wise old trainer (Forest Whitaker) to help him get back in fighting shape. If you already think this all ends with a big comeback fight against a perfectly loathsome rival (Miguel Gomez), you’ve definitively seen a boxing picture before. Besides, Gyllenhaal’s surname here is Hope. You’ve got to know where the symbolism is pointing. Sons of Anarchy showrunner Kurt Sutter’s screenplay plays every note you’d expect, doing so with a swaggering clobbering melodrama, confident in its ability to use an audience’s emotions as its speed bag. It thumps away.

Fuqua obliges the formulaic intentions of the material while keeping the visual interest on the performer’s bodies. He focuses attention on McAdams’ relaxed sensuality, Jackson’s broad-shouldered business posture, and Gomez’s slippery fighting stance. But most of all Fuqua takes in Gyllenhaal’s ripped musculature, a painful display of tense tautness. He clearly worked hard for this role, and is eager to show off every bit of the gain from the pain. But it also serves a purpose in telling us everything we need to know about this boxer. He likes the pain. Thanks to the announcers helpfully shouting out the subtext during the fights, we learn boxing fans know it’s not a Hope match until he’s bleeding. His wife tells him he needs to retire before he’s irreparably punch-drunk. But we soon learn how desperately he needs to keep going.

We get plenty of Hope’s frustration with his situation, followed by training montages as he works his way back to some semblance of normalcy. With a daughter’s happiness imperiled, it’s easy to root for him. But I appreciated the film’s ability to look somewhat askance at its protagonist, wondering if his cyclical bad behavior is something that can be fixed. But of course it can, and he can learn to control his temper in everyday life by learning to fight better in the ring. Instead of settling into the reality of its characters’ lives, the movie hops to the next expected beat. It never feels like a real situation, but an artificial construct built to fit the needs of its subgenre. It doesn’t breathe like the best of its brethren, where Rocky or Raging Bull or Million Dollar Baby (or even Real Steel) color in the specifics of their environments.

Southpaw is on a one-way track to the Big Match. It’s an athletic, well-coordinated display. Gyllenhaal can land convincing blows, and, because the emotions involved are so big, heavy, and unsurprising, the stakes are completely clear. The result is a good replica of a boxing match. It’s exciting and visceral, punches booming so forcefully in the sound mix I wondered what the Foley artists had to do, every jab timed to the usual orchestra of crowd reactions. It’s well made without being completely involving. I sat admiring the technique more than feeling the tension. Because the way there is so pro-forma, it’s hard to stay invested. The movie remains a glossy, well intentioned, but over-familiar narrative beginning to end.

Space Invaders: PIXELS

Eighties nostalgia is weaponized in Pixels, a light sci-fi comedy that sees unknown aliens send giant arcade games to invade the earth. Why? Apparently they picked up some thirty-year-old signals and they took it as a threat. The attacks start with an enormous Galaga game raining destruction on an Air Force base in Guam, reducing everything in sight to glowing piles of multicolored blocks. It’s clearly a crisis for bumbling President Kevin James, who was once just a kid in an arcade cheering on his good buddies in their quest to be champion gamers. Now he’s a buffoon no one likes, with plummeting approval ratings. How he got to be president in the first place is anyone’s guess. And now there are these aliens threatening to destroy the planet. What follows is a nonsense adventure out to flatter every nerd in the audience for merely recognizing the references.

James recruits a goofy and improbable ensemble to fight back the aliens in elaborate large-scale replications of classic games. He finds his old arcade pals – now an AV technician (Adam Sandler), a conspiracy nut (Josh Gad), and a prisoner (Peter Dinklage, looking like Billy Mitchell) – and forces them to train Marines in video game strategy. The gruff general (Brian Cox) is hopelessly confused, but reluctantly lets a lieutenant (Michelle Monaghan) get special tech prepared surprisingly quickly. Soon the dweebs and the military have giant phallic laser guns blasting away at Space Invaders, Centipede, and the like as aliens demand three contests, winner takes planet. If you already find yourself asking questions like, “How?” or “Why?” or “Who cares?” this is not your movie.

The nerds, we’re told repeatedly, are the only ones who know how to play the games, and therefore the world’s only hope. This seems to me a misunderstanding of video games’ popularity. You’d think a group of Marines would know a thing or two about joystick-eye coordination, and could grasp the basic strategy of these old games, especially since it boils down in practice to shooting at large glowing objects. Plus, it sets up a dated nerds-rule/jocks-drool underdog fight that doesn’t make sense in our world of unfortunately male-dominated Silicon Valley and other bro-ish tech enclaves where the simple power categories of dorks and sports have scrambled. But I suppose this isn’t exactly the movie to go looking for logic or coherence. It doesn’t even bother to show us the aliens behind the DayGlo lightshow attacks, expecting us to enjoy the sight of it all while chuckling at its cast’s antics and not thinking about it too much.

The movie’s idea of nerds is as old as the games they’re fighting. But the action is rather well done, like a lighthearted riff on a Transformers plot structure in which incomprehensible extraterrestrial conflict tears through some major cities and their landmarks. I enjoyed seeing the vibrant geometric shapes colliding with earthbound obstacles. At least it is action different from what we usually see, collateral damage chaos smashing apart solid matter into bits of glowing blocks. There’s some charm to seeing a towering Pac-Man chomping through a maze of New York City streets, or cavernous red alien scaffolding arranging itself into a King Kong-sized Donkey Kong setup. But it goes on and on without feelings of real danger, and the characters just aren’t funny or interesting enough to earn our investment.

Remaking a French short film by Patrick Jean, writers Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling (frequent Sandler collaborators) create podgy connective tissue for silly spectacle in the form of limp childish comedy and halfhearted relationships. The jokes largely fall flat, without a sharp sense of perspective or humor. We’re supposed to care if these guys earn validation despite learning little more than that they’re good at thirty-year-old video games. And it’s yet another movie where goofy guys stumble their way to greatness while patient women stand next to the fun, scowling or smirking. This one goes the extra mile, casting people like Jane Krakowski, Ashley Benson, and Serena Williams (!) to show up in a few scenes and smile, like prizes to be won or symbols to be displayed. Playing into pessimistic nerd culture inferiority and resentment, the movie sets itself up as wish-fulfillment for people who wish playing arcade games could be enough to 1.) earn a living, 2.) make you an important public figure, and 3.) get you ladies to objectify.

So the human stakes are unconvincing and vaguely insulting. But at least the zippy adventure moments largely work. It’s not an altogether unpleasant experience, which most definitely cannot be said for most Sandler comedies of late. The director here is Chris Columbus, whose work on the first two Harry Potter films shows his facility with bouncy effects work and convincing design. He has a competent eye for faux-Spielberg awe and workmanlike entertainment, and proves once more that, when given a director instead of an enabler, Sandler is a decent everyman. As a schlub shooting 8-bit aliens, we can almost believe it. The problem is only when he stands next to painfully wisecracking sidekicks, or when we’re asked to care if he gets to woo the lady in uniform, win over her moppet, and get the respect of the world. When the movie’s in motion, it goes down easily. But then it stops, and there’s that hollow aftertaste.

Gone Girl: PAPER TOWNS

Paper Towns introduces us to an intriguing character and decides it doesn’t want to tell her story. She’s Margo, a high school senior who is charismatic and mysterious, the sort of teenager others gossip about, inventing crazy escapades that are almost believable just because she’s so unpredictable and unknowable. Carrying herself with the intense faux-literary soulful gazes of too-cool-for-school types, she’s a reader and a thinker, prone to waxing philosophical while pulling pranks. She has supermodel good looks (because she’s played by one, Cara Delevingne) and a sharp mind, intimidating all around. These are understandable reasons for Quentin (Nat Wolff), the shy nerd who lives across the street, to nurse an unrequited crush. The two teens each bring a particular flavor to the film. She’s a fully stocked spice rack. He’s a sleeve of undercooked Wonder Bread. Want to guess which one becomes our protagonist?

The film opens with its best sequence, an escapade that brings boy and girl together. One late night, she shows up at his bedroom window to conscript his assistance. Her now ex-boyfriend has been cheating with one of her best friends and no one told her. She’s out to prank them all. Margo gets Quentin to be her getaway driver, heading out in his minivan, sneaking into homes of her former friends and, say, leaving a dead fish in the closet, or shaving an eyebrow off a bad bro. It’s all in good fun, and of course Quentin falls even more in love with her as, finished with their mission, they watch the sun come up over Orlando while dancing to a Muzak version of “Lady in Red.” There’s a warm sense of discovery here. Who is this girl?

We don’t get to find out. The next morning, Margo has disappeared. She’s run away from home, seemingly leaving no trace. It’s not the first time, we learn. But this time, Quentin takes it personally. How could she flee after such a magical night with him? Sure enough, he finds some clues, making him a painfully bland protagonist for a limp scavenger hunt, while reducing her to a set of facile puzzle pieces. She’s gone and taken the film’s most intriguing character with her. Instead we focus on the vaguely defined Quentin and his dumb friends (Justice Smith and Austin Abrams, doing what they can with awkward and overfamiliar comic relief) as they talk about girls and prom and senioritis, while slowly trying to figure out where Margo went and why.

Eventually, the guys think they’ve figured out her destination and decide to road trip there, with two girls from school (Halston Sage and Jaz Sinclair) tagging along as well. What follows is standard teen movie shenanigans – social bonding, worrying about drinking and sex, pop culture references, partying, worrying about the future – strung along a mystery that never feels particularly urgent. Director Jake Schreier doesn’t do much with the camera beyond keep the proceedings slick and in frame, while coaxing decent work from underwritten roles as the group of characters never comes into clear focus. They’re background players for our plain, foolishly lovesick, lead. Meanwhile, the logistics of their plan (what about money? or parents?) never becomes a concern. And why doesn’t Margo’s family get more worked up about a clear missing person case. It’s waved off with an overly convenient explanation in half a scene.

The screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, adapted from a book by John Green, doesn’t have the same sharply drawn characters or well-earned sentimentality of their previous collaboration, The Fault in Our Stars. It may share the Green formula of moody kids and quirky habits, deep thoughts and hard emotions. But there’s a hollow feeling to this one, a flat, uncurious dawdling. It creates three stereotypical high school guys, a little dumb and a lot blinkered. They’re just not interesting or complicated, remaining thinly developed types. (The girls are instantly more remarkable without ever getting the chance to step into the spotlight and prove it.) There are some charming moments – an impromptu Pokémon sing-along, a coincidentally timely Confederate flag joke – but I never felt invested in these characters or their relationships.

An almost reasonably diverting road trip, the movie is nonetheless haunted by the one character who isn’t even around for most of it, who in her brief appearances is so much more interesting than the people we actually follow. By the time we learn what happened to Margo, it’s a let down, not because there’s no resolution, but because we’ve come all this way just to see her complete a transformation into a symbol. She makes such an impact in the opening, it’s hard to watch her end up not a character, but a lesson to be learned. She’s too cool for such a fate. The movie ends with Quentin narrating his epiphany, teasing us with info about what Margo was up to, and then saying, “That’s her story to tell.” Something tells me that would’ve been the better story.