"The Drama" Movie Review

There are no rules that say an amateur reviewer can’t include spoilers in his review, so I’ll warn you up front: this entire review is full of spoilers. You’ve been warned!

First off, the title. It’s called The Drama but billed as a comedy. The title was absolutely fitting because this was not, by any means, a comedy. There was one completely misplaced 90-second scene toward the end with this goofy DJ who shows up to cap off a last-minute story arc. It was like he was from another movie altogether. He brought a slapstick energy to the movie that didn’t match a single note of the rest of the story. His appearance made no sense, and the words he was spewing were unnecessary and felt like he was reading from an entirely different script. Even the two actors seemed stunned and out of character as he delivered his monologue.

So the whole story is predicated on these four friends sharing “the worst thing they’ve ever done.” Oddly, none of the stories were that outrageous or terrible, and a lot more thought could have been put into creating a provocative and interesting narrative.

Zendaya’s BFF tells this weird story about how, when she was like 15 years old, she went into the woods behind her house with the neighborhood oddball boy. She later references “the woods” and “the forest,” which in itself is an odd term for a wooded area presumably behind a suburban housing development. Anyway, the story goes that he took her out there to see an abandoned RV. It was apparently dilapidated, all broken up, and littered with cigarette butts and porn magazines. Then she goes on to say that she noticed a closet. A closet?! In the forest?! No one stops her rant to ask, “Why and where was there a closet in the woods?” They just accept it, and she presses on. It doesn’t even pay to finish her story because it never gets very interesting or remotely seem like “the worst thing she’s ever done.”

Then it’s finally Zendaya’s turn, and she basically tells us, and we see snippets played out in flashback, that when she was 15 years old, she was a bit of a dweeb and was picked on in school. She stole her dad’s rifle and went out in the woods to practice target shooting because she planned to take it to school to “shoot up the school.” She claims she thought it through, planned it out in her head, and even went so far as to bring the rifle to school, but eventually thought better of it and never did anything. Weird. Kinda scary. Not a common fantasy for a high school girl, but whatever, she never did it anyway. Well, that sets off a catastrophic chain of events where her BFF wonders how they could be friends, and Robert Pattinson starts questioning how he could marry her now.

Her BFF immediately tears up and basically blames Zendaya because her cousin Sam has been in a wheelchair since childhood because of a… school shooting! Why is she mad at Zendaya? She didn’t shoot her cousin. In fact, she didn’t shoot anyone. She fantasized about it and eventually opted against it. No harm, no foul. And then there’s dreamy Edward the Vampire. He’s all messed up in the head because he keeps envisioning his fiancée with a rifle. Whatever! First of all, Zendaya is hot, too hot to even care about some stupid fantasy she had 15 years ago when she was a high school loser. Whatever she imagined, she never did it!

I’ll take a moment here to talk about Pattinson. He was wooden. It’s like he made this movie begrudgingly. He was so lazy and unaffected. He delivered his lines like he was on tranquilizers. And what’s with his hair? No one on set could stop and tell him to run a comb through it? Even at his wedding, he looked like a homeless man thrown into a tux and forced to attend a party. Anyway, I digress.

So then they’re at the wedding, and who else is there? And still the maid of honor? And still has a speech planned? Her BFF from the “forest” story, who has slowly grown to hate Zendaya and has all but written her off. Why would she still go to the wedding?

The whole wedding scene was a mess, and then the movie appears to close with an arthouse ending to make us think. It looked more like the writer got to the third act, wrote it about halfway, and said, “Ah, to hell with it!” So stupid.

- Paul Rosen