The King of Staten Island Review (6/14/2020)

There's a scene at the beginning of Judd Apatow's newest film The King of Staten Island where the protagonist, played by Pete Davidson, is driving down a highway and closes his eyes as he drifts. When he opens them, he swerves to just narrowly avoid a police car and surrounding vehicles blocking the center of the highway, and bumps into a couple of cars on his way back onto the road. This is almost comedically exaggerated, except as he keeps driving he mutters "I'm sorry" to himself over and over.

This scene has very little to do with the rest of the movie, but it sets a tone that is indicative of what I think the film was trying to be; a comedic but heartfelt character study of a deeply flawed and hurt individual, who tries to make up for his lack of drive, maturity and direction by lashing out at everyone around him with unbearably self-destructive tendencies. Unfortunately, through a series of poor executions, both mundane and baffling, this isn't quite what The King of Staten Island ends up being.

I initially decided to watch this film because while Judd Apatow has a general association for overlong raunchy comedies about overgrown toxic manchildren, he also every now and then puts out something really interesting. Take 2017's The Big Sick; while Apatow only produced it, it still had quite a few hallmarks of his work, with quippy dialogue, an extended runtime and humor co-existing with a geuninely emotional storyline. The Big Sick was one of my favorite films of 2017, and any names involved with it were bound to catch my eye going forward.

While The Big Sick was consistently both compelling and funny throughout, The King of Staten Island suffers on both fronts, and generally takes way too long to get into the meat of its story. In fact, this is such an apparent flaw that it almost feels like this is not one film, but two haphazardly jammed together, with the characters pivoting from one to another at a key moment in the film's plot.

The first hour and a half follows the film's protagonist, Scott; a 24 year old manchild who has no job, no house of his own and no drive except to freeload off of his mother and loser friends. His father, a firefighter, died when he was 7, and he was never able to get over it. When his mom starts dating a new man, who is also a firefighter, he gets upset and lashes out despite all attempts from his mom's new boyfriend to bond with him and bridge the gap.

This portion of the film is cringy, unfunny and generally boring. Beyond a couple of scenes in the opening that help us get inside his head, the protagonist is simply an indisputably awful person that's impossible to sympathize with. Any trouble he gets into is entirely his own fault, and every time there's conflict between him and another character it's impossible to take his side. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if the film took the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia route and ratcheted up the absurdity to 11, therefore creating all of the humor and the plot at his expense and allowing the audience to take pleasure from his awfulness. This doesn't happen, and while there is some absurdity, it's not quite enough. Scott isn't some ridiculous superjerk, he's just an ordinary run of the mill manchild who never grew up and makes everyone else miserable, and he keeps being this way long after we've gotten the point.

The jokes in this section of the film are all overlong to the point where they're driven into the ground, bland pop culture references that stopped being relevant around the time the film likely went into production, or just bland quips that are plain unfunny. The characters are all uninteresting and unlikeable, and there's practically no plot. It's a comedic character study that's not funny and doesn't do a good job of exploring its central character; it just kinda puts him into cringy situation after cringy situation, giving the audience an endless stream of awful scenes to feel uncomfortable with. About the only redeeming aspect of this part of the film is an excellent performance by Pete Davidson that really gives life to the character in a way that the writing doesn't.

Something weird happens about two thirds of the way into the film, however. Scott is kicked out of his mother's house, and the film enters what would generally be its third and final act. But here, the story seems to shift gears almost entirely. It suddenly drops all of the light absurdism and pop cultural quips from its first hour and a half and begins to actually focus on its human side. People stop talking like wisecracking movie characters and start talking like people. Scott begins to grow as a person and makes actual emotional bonds while he begins to develop an actual drive and passion for the future. It's the kind of genuine, heartfelt story with realistic characters that made me love The Big Sick so much.

But in being sequestered into the final forty-five minutes of the film, this part of the story - which is unequivacobly the best part of the film - comes off as rushed. It ends on a very arbitrary note, and plot threads and characters from the first half are dropped without any real form of addressing them. There's just not enough time for this story to flourish, and by the time I even got here I had mostly checked out from the tedium of the first half anyway.

What's left is, in no uncertain terms, a truly bizarre film. It feels like the entirety of the film's first and second act were meant to be just set-dressing for the actual story, which is entirely relegated to the film's last forty-five minutes. As I said earlier, it feels like two movies mashed together; with the first and second acts of the first acting as the first for the second, and the second and third acts of the second acting as the third of the first. If that sentence was confusing to read, imagine watching it play it out in front of you. I really don't think this sort of bizarre structure was intentional, as this is a fairly conventional type of story and would generally benefit the most from following a conventional structure (though I generally dislike the prevalence of three act story structure, I do not mean this in a bad way here - not every movie needs to reinvent the wheel to be good). Rather, it seems that this is the result of a long string of poor writing, directing and editing choices.

The King of Staten Island was written by Pete Davidson and Judd Apatow, and is intended to be a semi-autobiographical film based on Davidson's battles with depression and grief over his own firefighter father, who died in the September 11th attacks. Clearly, this is not just a cash grab project, and is an actual work of passion between two artists who have a story they want to tell. With that in mind, it's quite bizarre that nobody realized that the true meat of the story was being skewered throughout the creative process. There is a shockingly high amount of untapped potential in this film that we only really get a glimpse of in the final act, and while I truly commend Davidson for going the extra mile and creating such a personal work, the end result is so much less than it could have been. While I can't call it a truly bad movie, it's not one I can recommend either.