Shawn's Smart People Review

2008 Movie #84 - Smart People

This is one of those movies that proves that I absolutely could never be a professional movie reviewer, not that anyone was saying I could anyway. The reason is because there is no way I could come up with enough to say about this movie to fill up an entire article. I will barely be able to come up with a couple of paragraphs for this blog even.

I didn’t hate this movie, I didn’t love this movie, hell I didn’t even like this movie. I nothing this movie. If I had to pick one of those, my emotion would probably be closest to hate but that word is way too strong. I basically feel absolutely nothing towards this movie. It started, I watched it, then it ended. Nothing worthwhile really happened in the middle part.

The movie certainly has a good cast going for it. Usually you can’t go wrong with Dennis Quaid and he does do a good job here, it’s just hard to get invested in his character. That’s pretty much my main problem with the movie is that I didn’t give a shit about anyone in it. When you’re watching what is essentially a character study, you better care at least a little bit about the characters who are being studied. Here you really don’t at all.

The story also feels like it’s trying to do way too much in the short running time (thank god for that short running time actually). There are a whole lot of subplots, but none of them are particularlily interesting. There is one that’s actually kind of creepy that hints at a romance between a niece and uncle. That story basically goes nowhere though and in the end just kind of stops. I really didn’t care if anything worked out for these people, I basically just wanted them all to shut the fuck up and for the credits to roll.

Looks like I actually did a pretty decent job of writing a pretty lengthy review for this, but really it’s not worth the time to write more about it than this. It may appeal to some, but I just can’t get into a movie that is completely character based, but has no characters that I even remotely care about. The movie could have ended with all of them dying in a fire and I think I would have been pretty satisfied.

* ½ / 5