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Runtime: 1 hr 35 mins
Theatrical Release: Jul 3, 2008 Limited
Box Office: $1,739,074
Synopsis: It’s the summer of 1994, and the streets of New York are pulsing with hip hop and wafting with the sweet aroma of marijuana. The newly-inaugurated mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, is only beginning to implement his anti-fun initiatives against “crimes” like noisy portable radio, graffiti and... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Ben Kingsley, Famke Janssen, Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby, Mary-Kate Olsen
The Wackness, while no masterpiece, is the kind of film that doesn’t come to much but is watchable as it saunters along with a provoking sense of meaningful pessimism. The performances are really the thing — Levine hasn’t managed anything better.
The film's forlorn charm is a little reminiscent of Cameron Crowe's adolescent memoir Almost Famous. It's a tiny bit soppy, too, but you can forgive that in a teenager.
The Wackness is a teen drama, set in 1994 against a backdrop of laidback hip-hop and a roasting hot New York which tries just a bit too hard to be cool. But it is definitely not wack (bad).
Kingsley is likewise on form and hits home with some terrifically world-weary one liners, while director Jon Levine brings a refreshing inventiveness to the film.
It's a reasonably promising debut, though, and Sir Ben looks as though he had a lot of fun, not least when he's deflowering Mary-Kate Olsen, surprisingly funny as the planet's last remaining hippy.
It’s not quite da bomb, but this nostalgic throwback to the recent past still has enough phat acting (especially from Sir Ben) and slammin’ scenes to seem both fly and fresh. Worth catching? Damn skippy.
The Wackness offers more than fuzzy giggles and bongwater-weak characters.
Levine's film is often showy, clumsy, over-earnest. But then so are its characters. So is late adolescence. The Wackness carries out the advice Squires gives to Luke - make a mess, embrace pain. In doing so, it ends up anything but wack.
Its writer-director, Jonathan Levine, lavishes the movie with inky black shadows and soft gauzy close-ups, making it mostly feel like a dream, or a half-conjured memory.
An amiable but essentially empty film made enjoyable by a decent soundtrack, funny dialogue and Ben Kingsley's mad doctor.
Kingsley’s shamelessly zingy performance adds welcome pep, and a delicate, achingly sincere summertime idyll on Fire Island offers notice of Levine’s evident promise.
An unlikely buddy comedy that comes to life whenever Kingsley appears - he doesn’t so much steal the show as roll it into a fat blunt and smoke it.
By Doug Cooper - It's a quirky, offbeat affair, meandering at times but honest and amusing too.
Levine has an eye for detail and the germ of what Stephen Colbert might call a "truthy" idea - that it is possible, even through a chemically induced fog of numbness, to genuinely feel for another person.
When all is said and done, it's not perfect, but it's strong nonetheless...
The loose plot feels imposed on the offbeat characters, and doesn't link the people and incidents together in any satisfying way.
That first sight of Ben Kingsley sucking down a bowl will burn into your memory. You may be watching The Wackness but it's hard to forget that this is Gandhi putting Bic to bong in Jonathan Levine's silly, sappy and sympathetic coming-of-age memoir.
Quite aside from its dramatic ambitions, The Wackness does a nifty job of capturing the zeitgeist of Manhattan on the eve of Rudy Giuliani’s big crackdown on drugs, thugs, sex shops and colorful street life.
It was applauded at Sundance, where coming-of-age movies are inevitably hailed, but its grungy angst offers nothing we need to see anew.
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