Everybody Wants Some!!
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Written by: Richard Linklater
Starring: Blake Jenner, Juston Street, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, Glen Powell, Temple Baker, J. Quinton Johnson, Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Austin Amelio, Tanner Kalina, Forrest Vickery
Comedy - 116 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 31 Mar 2016
Written by: Richard Linklater
Starring: Blake Jenner, Juston Street, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, Glen Powell, Temple Baker, J. Quinton Johnson, Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Austin Amelio, Tanner Kalina, Forrest Vickery
Comedy - 116 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 31 Mar 2016
Everybody Wants Some!! is light as a feather. I cannot recall another almost two hour film without any conflict at all. Its closest college kin, perhaps Animal House, had Dean Wormer and a snobby frat house to fight against. Our baseball boys enjoy a stress free lifestyle full of booze and chicks without the annoyance of classes. College is handed to them on a silver platter. Some say it’s a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused and others says it picks up right where Boyhood left off. It doesn’t matter. The new Richard Linklater film is all fluff; it’s cruising around to “My Sharona” without the inevitable “Love Hurts” come down. The drunken adolescents are fun enough to watch, but there is less than meets the eye to enjoy.
If a car full of dudes in their late teens are going to sing “Rapper’s Delight,” then I would expect maybe 15 seconds of it; just a quick recognition, a look of good times, and then on to the next scene. Not Everybody Wants Some!! We have time to laze around here; they give “Rapper’s Delight” just about the full Wayne’s World “Bohemian Rhapsody.” There are multiple extended dance sequences and party montages and we even watch the guys play baseball once. The jocks are not Animal House wild; they would prefer to keep their scholarships, but they’re not above breaking the rules about no alcohol in the house and no chicks upstairs.
If a car full of dudes in their late teens are going to sing “Rapper’s Delight,” then I would expect maybe 15 seconds of it; just a quick recognition, a look of good times, and then on to the next scene. Not Everybody Wants Some!! We have time to laze around here; they give “Rapper’s Delight” just about the full Wayne’s World “Bohemian Rhapsody.” There are multiple extended dance sequences and party montages and we even watch the guys play baseball once. The jocks are not Animal House wild; they would prefer to keep their scholarships, but they’re not above breaking the rules about no alcohol in the house and no chicks upstairs.
The audience gets a look at life in the college baseball house through the eyes of new freshman pitcher Jake (Blake Jenner). Pulling up to the house in his Trans Am and his crate full of LPs, we probably don’t even need Linklater’s on screen announcement that it is 26 August 1980. There is the 8-track in the car, the skinny T-shirts, knee socks, and headbands. Jake goes through a bunch of intros because we are in a group ensemble and the supporting goofballs range from the over-the-top psychopath through the country bumpkin up to the major league baseball ready pseudo-adult in the room.
While Dazed and Confused was Linklater’s high school movie, Everybody Wants Some!! is his homage to the college years. The beer flows, the ladies are on standby, and the intense, enlightening conversations spun around the bong passing circle are deep. The boys in the house are beginning to learn who they are and poke at the boundaries of their new freedom to make actual choices in their lives. I wonder how many of them will learn they are stock archetypes and will never quite achieve that elusive third dimension.
They are a baseball team but Linklater chose to leave most of the sports in the dugout. The narrative and atmosphere are all about camaraderie and living on the edge knowing that at any moment it may be your turn to be the target of the room’s ridicule and the butt of the latest prank. We meet enough guys where it feels as if we meet the full baseball team and there is even a girl in the mix as Jake tries to get the attention of Beverly (Zoey Deutch, Vampire Academy), a gorgeous theater geek.
This is not punch line humor you would hear in a sitcom; no obvious set-ups for someone to walk in and spike the laugh. This is laid back situational humor fueled by oddballs. Getting familiar with at first strange college surroundings is an experience a lot of people in the audience will relate to as well as the very early 1980s for those who had conscious thought back then. However, a very slim minority will nod their heads in a nostalgia fog reminiscing over free beer, a different girl every night, and sleeping through the first day of class. It is the rare collegiate who gets through four years of that routine.
Everybody Wants Some!! is a boy’s dream of college. This is how you imagine life in the frat house while you’re stuck in high school. Instead of bursting our bubble on what college is really like, Linklater shows us the dream. This may produce some laughs, but it’s mostly inexplicable how little friction there is; these are cozy Marmaduke level vignettes, not a film.
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