mid90s

I got worried about this film very early on. First of all, it suffered from The Wedding Singer syndrome. Now The Wedding Singer qualifies as being Not Adam Sandler’s worst film, largely on the basis of Adam Sandler having made so many terrible films. But it is Set in the 1980s which is generally an excuse to suggest that everyone then dressed like Boy George and was unaware of any music that was more than a year old.

Similarly, Mid90s is Set in, er, the mid 90s, and the opening shots of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bedsheets and Beavis and Butthead t-shirts made you fear that this was going to be a very long list of Signifiers which are largely there to state the bloody obvious. Fortunately there’s only about 10 minutes of this stuff at the start of the film.

Second strike is the long and interminable scenes of teenage boys doing tricks on skateboards. Now i can think of little that i find more boring than watching skateboarders and i never found teenage boys very interesting even when i was a teenage boy. Which left a big feeling that the film wasn’t made for people like me.

To give it its due, there was some good characterisation, and even though none of the teenage boys had anything much to say, they kept your attention. And while the plot meandered around more than ever getting anywhere, it sort of kept you on board

So it wasn’t the worst film ever, but i couldn’t honestly say that i felt any warmth for it in my heart