Nathan Laing

4/10

Brie Larson and Netflix have both been responsible for mild disappointment this year, so I guess Unicorn Store’s quality makes sense. I have been a fan of Brie Larson as an actress for quite some time now so seeing her overly stoic performance in Captain Marvel and especially her inconsistently overly the top character in this film was quite a shock. The problem seems to come from Larson’s direction, the film lacks focus and all of the performances feel unmanaged and all over the place. The film lacks the unique visual style that an indie film like this really needs to win over its audience and as a result it never manages to fully work for me. The story itself should take some of the blame for this film just not working however as it is just not clear who the demographic for this is and what message the writer (Samantha McIntyre) wanted to give to them. On the outset this is children’s film or at least a family film but the countless office based scenes and sub-plot about sexual harassment make this a strange choice to show a child. Despite all this, Unicorn Store is far from the worst of the year. With a more seasoned director and maybe an extra re-write this could be salvaged. Indie films with stranger concepts have become classics. As it stands Unicorn Store joins a very select group of films that are both too quirky and too generic at the same time. I compare this to some of the films that Zooey Deschanel would star in during the ‘00s, so if there is any hope Larson will star in her own (500) Days of Summer type satire of her current works. But until then this is what we have, here hoping that Endgame will give her some much needed positive attention, if not Room still exists.

Mex5150

2/10

With Brie Larson being so prominent in movie news recently, and as I'm not a big superhero movie fan, I thought this would be a great choice to check out what she can do, sadly I was very wrong. It's an incredibly shallow movie that wants really badly to be deep and meaningful. Apart from its obvious goal to be deep and meaningful though it has no idea what else it wants to be. It's rather schizophrenic in that a lot of the movie appears to have been written by a bored nine-year-old girl who isn't allowed outside to play because it's raining, but other parts feel like they were written by a jaded hack writer who's been forced to take a nine-to-five job in an office and wants to get their own back. The part where Kit's (Larson's character) new boss complains about there being such a lack of imagination around here was speaking more about the film itself than anything else. I know it was Larson's first try at directing, but she did a very poor job, it was terribly uneaven, unimaginative, and batters you over the head with what she probably thought were subtitles. The acting (if I even dare call it that) was terrible from everybody, including a few of the cast who normally can turn in a good to great performance. And the dialogue was terrible, possibly the worst part of the movie. It was back to the nine-year-old girl writing what she thinks is the way witty and clever grown-ups talk and missing the mark dramatically. This is all somewhat of a shame because with a good rewrite and somebody with more experience and vision at the helm, this could have been a really good little movie.