Delayed Reaction: November Criminals

The Pitch: Have Ansel Elgort and Chloe Grace Moretz been in a movie together yet? I mean, other than Carrie...Just put them in a movie. It makes sense.

After a friend is killed, one teen makes it his mission to prove that it wasn't a gang-related killing.

That sure was a waste of time.

I was pretty interested in this after the trailer. Chloe Grace Moretz. Ansel Elgort. I like them. I'm seen just about all their movies, because they pick projects well.

The trailer presents an easy to like premise: a good kid gets tied up in the underworld of his school/community. He's the only one who cares about this murder. Hell, this could be Brick. Then, there's the fact that the victim was black and everyone is assuming it's a gang thing. Maybe there will be some good race stuff.

Not really. I spent the entire movie trying to figure out if it was positioning everything for a big reveal or if it was just incompetent. Nothing made sense. It just jumped from plot point to plot point without much explanation.

Here's the movie I think they were trying to make.

Ansel Elgort is a social outcast. He recently reconnected Moretz, a cool girl in his class, who he was friends with before his family life went haywire as a kid. A friend of his is shot and killed. The police are convinced that it's a gang shooting and essentially give up on investigating it. Elgort refuses to accept this. He knows his friend wasn't in a gang and won't let that be the narrative. He believes that he can be the difference, so he dives deeper and deeper into the criminal underworld of his city to find out what he needs to. Eventually, it's revealed that Elgort's mother died suddenly as a child, which messed him up. Elgort couldn't do anything about that, but he can do something about this. He does end up finding the truth of how his friend died and restores his name.

The actual movie is more like a first draft of that. It's never clear why Elgort and Moretz start becoming friends again and falling for each other. That all happens before the movie but is treated like it's a new enough development that has no explanation. Elgort plays one of those characters who prides himself on not having a cell phone. That's a thing screenwriters like to do to make their job easier. It never really makes sense for the characters, but it isolates characters super easily. This friend of Elgort's is more on an acquaintance. I assume the real reason why the cops assume it's a gang thing is because the victim is black. That's addressed once. A cop says it's not a race thing one time though, so that means it's definitely not a race thing. The movie then proceeds under the knowledge that it's not a race thing because that cop said it once. Apparently, saying the murder of a kid working at a bakery is a gang thing is enough for the police to give up, by the way. That makes sense. When Elgort does go into the criminal underworld, it's not for very long and not all that tense. It's all pretty nice and clean. Oh, and because Elgort's mother died, he's only upper-middle class, not rich like Moretz, so Moretz's mother doesn't approve of them being together. He's a bad seed or something.

I think the big twist is the revelation that Elgort's mother's death is what motivates his obsession (It really wasn't that obsessive) about his friend's death. That's more of a "so what" than a "surprise".

I'm going to stop here. I just plain didn't like this movie. It was a mess. It's the kind of mess that I don't think anyone realized while they were filming. It wasn't until they got to editing that there isn't a good way to piece it all together. And, since it's a little movie that no one cared much about, it's not like they would do reshoots to fix it. This movie was buried for a reason.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend