Paramount Pictures | Release Date: March 30, 2016
7.0
USER SCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 205 Ratings
USER RATING DISTRIBUTION
Positive:
145
Mixed:
35
Negative:
25
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1
VagabundoJul 17, 2016
Very disppointing, particularly as I am a fan of Linklater's work. Even if these are supposed to be college kids, do they all have to be such total jerks and **** Hard to relate when almost none of the characters are likeable. And why areVery disppointing, particularly as I am a fan of Linklater's work. Even if these are supposed to be college kids, do they all have to be such total jerks and **** Hard to relate when almost none of the characters are likeable. And why are all the actors 24 and older? It is obvious that they are not college students which ruins any versimilitude. The distaff casting reeks of misogyny. Every girl is a babe or a starlet, just like when I was in school. Not. No real story, no baseball, a clueless coach. Yuck Expand
4 of 4 users found this helpful40
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0
SpillydJul 15, 2016
I have no idea how you could give this steaming turd anything over a 1. And to see excellent critic reviews is truly puzzling. It definitely tries to be Dazed and Confused but in reality turns into a way too long music video. 90% of theI have no idea how you could give this steaming turd anything over a 1. And to see excellent critic reviews is truly puzzling. It definitely tries to be Dazed and Confused but in reality turns into a way too long music video. 90% of the movie is just filler for a greatest hits of the 70's and 80's soundtrack. The characters are ridiculous and the comedy as non-existent as any type of compelling story. There are few movies that I won't watch to the end but this movie actually made me angry at how bad it was and I had to turn it off when it very predictably moved to the "punk" genre of music which we predicted well before it happened. It was infuriating!!!!! Expand
3 of 4 users found this helpful31
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0
iwantabagelJul 23, 2016
Very disappointed in this movie. What a waste of time. Predictable is an understatement, and the acting is so poorly it hurts. It must be the my-(step)parents-are-directors, otherwise I could not see how this casting have been made. FlatVery disappointed in this movie. What a waste of time. Predictable is an understatement, and the acting is so poorly it hurts. It must be the my-(step)parents-are-directors, otherwise I could not see how this casting have been made. Flat character, one dimensial and completely unbelievable. Most boring thing I've seen in a while. Expand
3 of 4 users found this helpful31
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1
TaplingerJul 22, 2016
What am I missing here? Almost everyone loves this movie. It's so bad I walked out. To begin with, jocks aren't usually very likeable, and the jocks here are particularly one-dimensional and awful, with the exception of the male lead.
2 of 3 users found this helpful21
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1
joseBJul 15, 2016
Wow, was looking forward to this from the reviews and LInklater's previous work but what a waste. What about this movie was so appealing? The music is the only thing keeping it from a "0" score. Vain, shallowly of its period and that stage ofWow, was looking forward to this from the reviews and LInklater's previous work but what a waste. What about this movie was so appealing? The music is the only thing keeping it from a "0" score. Vain, shallowly of its period and that stage of human maturation, and a shame. You can only write and direct a poor, played out and boring story that borrows from your movie that is nearly 20 years old now and expect so much. The white characters look exactly like each other with the only distinguishing feature is mustache. It was a sad attempt at a movie, though more of a remake than an actual movie and one that might, or should, only be less embarrassing than Ghostbusters (2016). Expand
2 of 3 users found this helpful21
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3
GoTV32May 6, 2016
Doesn't compare well to other Linklater. Some funny/cute moments but overall ho-hum run-through of a college baseball team. When it finally got to some "deep" moments I was just worn out and a bit bored by the movie. Frankly I'm surprised byDoesn't compare well to other Linklater. Some funny/cute moments but overall ho-hum run-through of a college baseball team. When it finally got to some "deep" moments I was just worn out and a bit bored by the movie. Frankly I'm surprised by the raves, and this one (in combination with the great Metacritic reviews of the Revenant and the Witch) finally made feel like I have to weigh in online. Movies just don't hold a candle to the great TV shows out there now...maybe it's the running time limits. Expand
2 of 4 users found this helpful22
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2
ScraperJul 6, 2016
A one-dimensional view of young manhood disguised as nostalgia. 10-20 characters on screen at any given time and each one is the same person depending on their genitals. Brainlessness can be entertaining if not simply given a pass if there isA one-dimensional view of young manhood disguised as nostalgia. 10-20 characters on screen at any given time and each one is the same person depending on their genitals. Brainlessness can be entertaining if not simply given a pass if there is variety in their actions and settings. No variety in camera work, dialogue, lighting, or any other elements that make a movie unique. Just a bunch of beautiful idiots sitting around, occasionally tilting their heads down and flashing a smile. Sucks. Expand
1 of 2 users found this helpful11
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0
rosabelle93May 18, 2016
I was looking forward to this one after Metacritic reviews. What an absolute bore of a film. Actors really trying hard to be funny, it was embarrassing. Had to walk out.
4 of 9 users found this helpful45
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1
AxeTApr 29, 2016
It's not that nostalgic comedy dramas built around hit song playlists from the period are a problem.
It's not that autobiographical coming of age memoirs are a problem.
It's not even that entirely unknown casts are tasked to carry plotless
It's not that nostalgic comedy dramas built around hit song playlists from the period are a problem.
It's not that autobiographical coming of age memoirs are a problem.
It's not even that entirely unknown casts are tasked to carry plotless narrative. "Dazed and Confused" was good, and "American Graffiti" is a classic. (Actually both had some plot at least.)
No the problem here is a well intentioned writer/director instead of making a movie for an audience, lazily slapped together a half ass scenario expecting his cherished memories to hold up for the rest of us. The music is great, but its use is utterly uninspired. There's attention to the fashions, styles and props of the time. No attention whatsoever is paid to good story craft. There is not one memorable line of dialogue in an endless stream of non-stop banal talk, with incessant intended humor that is never funny but always needlessly raunchy, long soft edged sloppy unmotivated scenes, sluggishly slow pacing, not one minute of suspense (yes even in comedies you need some), and zero visual style.

Linklater is a longtime director working in a variety of genres and notable for exploring offbeat subjects and is highly commendable for his strides in innovative techniques. I've been following him all along. However between "Before Midnight" (Absurdly over-rated cringe inducing eavesdrop on a long, dull bickering middle aged marital conflict in real time with no sense of cinema evident), then "Boyhood" (Not terrible, just obscenely over-praised! Amazing original idea regarding how to make a movie does not translate necessarily into a 'good' movie'!) and now this thing… that following is over. He's worked long and hard to get to this point where he can probably make whatever he wants now and the financing within reason will likely be there for him. That doesn't excuse this terribly deficient effort or the powers that be for financing it. Not that it cost anything to make, the production value is near as low as it gets. Again that's not the problem, an excruciatingly boring self indulgent whack off with no regard for the audience is. Any audience!
To paraphrase from it, "Just because some pages were filled in and cameras rolled doesn't make it a movie!"

Yet it gets a pass by the worthless sheep next door purely because his name is now on their predictably dishonest pretentious list of do-gooders. The stooges are so incompetent or corrupt they destroy any vestige of integrity left in their so-called profession.
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2 of 5 users found this helpful23
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3
Mike_MApr 24, 2016
This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. If you're going to make a movie about Texas college baseball jocks in 1980 (especially jocks on the most successful team on campus), you're obliged to do something to let the audience know WHY those players are the most gentle, open-minded college jocks they have ever, ever seen. It can't just go unexplained, or it beggars belief. The movie is not intended to be a farce, quite clearly.

Even the two most aggressive guys (the great batter and the manic pitcher) are ultimately adorably harmless. This is not how it works. Their conflict at a practice without coaches should end in a fistfight
when the manic pitcher won't shut up after getting beat. You don't run your mouth at a teammate after getting hit on. The manic pitcher's outburst in the bar should also be far, far uglier, and it should end in a real fight. And the stuff that comes out of their mouths most of the time should be filthy as hell. I am NOT objecting to "gentle comedy" as a genre. I'm objecting to the total lack of appropriate set-up in this one, and the ensuing unbelievability.

And I'm not faulting the characters for being horny, drunk 21 year olds (played by mostly 30 year olds, for putatively some good reason, but really because 21 year old actors wouldn't be able to handle the house of cards Linklater has set up here). I don't think that young men are monsters for getting laid and drinking on a free weekend before college. (There are complaints about this movie from some corners of the internet that have "liberal puritan double-standard" written all over them. I am not coming from that corner.) But having played college sports myself, and known other college athletes at the time and since, this is the LEAST awful group of 16 college jocks that I can possibly imagine, and the movie is set in 1980 Texas. They may as well be unicorns.

I understand that this is supposed to be a gentle, philosophical comedy, and I have no problem with that in theory. I would definitely watch a movie where a given collection of jocks are great human beings,
just out of the sheer creative audacity of seeing where that goes, and the things you can do with genres that depict an idealized world. But I don't want to watch idealized college athletes (or any other group)
unless I have some damn reason to know why there aren't horrible human beings in that mix of 16 guys. The answer can't just be "because the genre is gentle, thoughtful comedy". Give me something with a piece of verisimilitude that I can hang onto. 16 golfers at Brown in 2016 have worse people among them than this.

So, oddly akin to The Revenant or Boyhood, the movie doesn't work as realism, nor does it work as something heightened; on top of that it has 1-dimensional characters. I don't want to see Acclaimed Director, the movie. Every movie must stand or fall on its own.

ULTIMATELY MORE IMPORTANTLY, this weekend-before-college movie (like any slice-of-life type of movie) will sink or swim on the quality of the bits, the moments, the character sketches. If each scene or moment is golden, all is forgiven, and it lives on in the way that The Big Sleep or Shortcuts or Day for Night or The Big Lebowski are great movies. In those, perfect scene-by-scene charm wins the day. Truth through Beauty. But in this particular movie, some of the bits, scenes, characters etc. are very good, while others are wholly bland, vague and threadbare. Could 'philosophizing jocks' get it right some times, and wrong some times, and just have some sophomoric marijuana ideas sometimes- sure, yes, why not? BUT EACH one of those scenes of 'philosophizing jocks' has to be somehow really interesting without feeling overly polished, or phony, or done to death, or otherwise uncharming. It's a pure fancy-footwork kind of storytelling art. And half of the bits/scenes in this movie have two left feet. This is the second movie in a row from Linklater that is not about real life or real people but purports to be, while using facile characters and after-lunch philosophizing. The first, Boyhood, was a full-throttle melodrama with a grand gimmick. This one plays one sport with the equipment of another: College Hump-or-Die movie rules, but with handmade character comedy gear. If you don't see this, let me ask you one question: WHAT is it that makes the main character Jake a SPECIFIC person who hits it off with Beverly, another specific person, besides the genre fulfillment of 'the two sensitive people find each other'?? Nothing. Nothing but Blake Jenner and Zoey Deutch saying the lines with talent. Can you say that about Say Anything, or are those two characters specific as hell, and therefore a response to the High School Hump-or-Die movies, and not just a mutant version of one? Heck, college farce Animal House, the ultimate Hump-or-Die movie, has more to say than this movie does. I'm now positive that Linklater is one director when working with actor/writers Hawke and Delpy, and quite another when he's not.
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2 of 6 users found this helpful24
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3
fungusgnatMay 1, 2016
There is enough variety and idiosyncrasy in Linklater's bros to allow him to fully exercise the breadth of his talent for character-writing and for catching the telling gesture or the comment that proves whether someone is in group or out.There is enough variety and idiosyncrasy in Linklater's bros to allow him to fully exercise the breadth of his talent for character-writing and for catching the telling gesture or the comment that proves whether someone is in group or out. That said, there is not a lot of character evolution over the course of this film, and thus not much of a point beyond everybody’s trying to get some [one critic actually asked “some what”? well, not character evolution]. It’s disappointing that Linklater would be satisfied with such a blatantly hedonistic work, an "Animal House" for a new generation looking back at an old one. (One of the movie’s small pleasures is the re-creation of a 1980-era disco--along with a cowboy bar and a punk club.) (Best-made case for the film: Dan Kois in “Slate.”) Expand
0 of 2 users found this helpful02
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0
djalexSep 21, 2017
I am a Linklater fan but not a fan of this. On the + side it does leave you with a bit of feeling nostalgic for what may have happened for you in real life but only because you are saying to yourself "thats not what it was like in a punkI am a Linklater fan but not a fan of this. On the + side it does leave you with a bit of feeling nostalgic for what may have happened for you in real life but only because you are saying to yourself "thats not what it was like in a punk club i the 80's" at the screen. It has smudges of Linklater's touch that you might have wanted when you sought out this film to watch. The major problem out of many is Its full of cliches borrowed from the movies and its not based on any reality. its like a commercial for an adolescent fantasy for what some kids older brother may have been doing in the 80's based on the bulls**t stories he overheard him tell people to impress them. At best It gives you the feeling you are watching a teen sexploitation film from the 80's that ran on hbo on a loop so you got used to it and liked it because it reminded you of when you were 12 and that film was always on. None of the college age characters look their age. Every single woman is a babe who's purpose is to be chased for sex or is to deny sex to the men. I dont mind that their is no story because thats what linklater is able to usually pull off ( a kind of moment in time without the annoying hollywood narrative overdrive). I can't remember a single character's name and had a hard time remembering the differences between them. It was an effort to listen to them talk about what they cared about or to care about them at all. Every setting is a film set that has no basis in reality. If this movie was in a different genre handled by a different director these overly fake sets, settings and wardrobe could be seen as forced on purpose to make a point about Americas love for its idea of itself. But this isn't that genre or type of film or the point at all. The poor directing, casting (not the actors performances but their obvious age discrepency) art direction, props and wardobe are not serving anything but to make a really insulated limited film in the same way a tv commercial or music video is made simply to sell one emotion and associate it with a cheap product that needs to fly off the shelves fast. I would love to see a filmmaker who criticizes hollywood and Americas addiction to its fake narratives about itself make a response to this type of cliche factory that is Everybody Wants Some. What would it be like if Paul Verhoven made this film with these same terrible choices the way he did with Starship Troopers to mock hollywood while making hollywood, thereby, both succeeding in the genre while simultaneously mocking it and the audience for buying into it. Or it would be great to see a dark response to this cliche filmmaking with a film by Michael Haneke or Von Trier showing the destructiveness of these boring cliches being forced down our throats over and over. Everybody Wants Some has a few charms if you do the work to extract them from its horrible media cliches. This film is not nostalgia for anything that can be believed to have happened in real life its simply a post card from bad 80's movies about bad 80's college movies and it feels like a commercial about that post card. Shallow dead pop with little entertainment value in dialogue, sequences or events of any kind. Expand
0 of 0 users found this helpful00
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1
AmberRoseJun 27, 2017
what's this movie even about? Are they shooting anything these days? It wasn't even funny, not a single aspect of this movie draws you in. Couldn't finish it and had to walk out.
0 of 0 users found this helpful00
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