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Movie Review: 'Everybody Wants Some!!'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Although Everybody Wants Some!! comes from the same director as 1993's Dazed and Confused, it is not a sequel.

After all, it's been over twenty years and none of the same characters are involved.

But it feels like one because they both come from the same director, Richard Linklater, because the earlier teen classic focused on the end of high school while the new one concentrates on the beginning of college, and because Dazed and Confused tackled the seventies while Everybody Wants Some!! introduces the eighties.

Natural progression, any way you look at it.

Of course, since Linklater established himself on the movie landscape with Slacker and then the memorable and influential Dazed and Confused, he has turned out an eclectic array of films, including the trilogy of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight; School of Rock; Me and Orson Welles; Waking Life; Bad News Bears; Fast Food Nation; Bernie; and last year's Oscar-winning Boyhood.

And the road between boyhood and manhood is the path we travel in Everybody Wants Some!!, in which writer-director Linklater, borrowing the title and its exclamation points from a 1980 Van Halen song, looks in on a group of college-freshmen baseball players who are getting their essential first taste of unsupervised adulthood at a small college in Texas, (fictional) Southeastern Texas State University.

 

2½
(2½ stars out of 4)

 

It's a deft school-daze comedy that's virtually plotless, but spans the first few days of college in the off-campus baseball dorm, when the members of the baseball team -- apparently consumed with but two things: baseball and sex -- more or less replace the family each player/student has left at home.

Blake Jenner plays the protagonist, Jake, a pitcher trying to fit in and win the approval of his new-friend teammates even if he doesn't appreciate and identify with all the boorish boys-being-boys behavior going on around him, especially from someone like McReynolds, played by Tyler Hoechlin, the self-appointed alpha-male leader.

In other words, Jake would like to, if possible, hang on to his more sensitive side, despite the suggestiveness of the film's title and all the bro-centric shenanigans.

The colorful and diverse array of characters, mostly jocks, also includes Finnegan, the resident intellectual played by Glen Powell; Beverly, an aspiring actress played by Zoey Deutch; and philosophical stoner Willoughby, played by Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn), who can't help but remind us of the Wooderson character played by Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.

Linklater, who was himself a college baseball player, fields a team of little-known actors who look as if they really can play the game, while their director presents a relaxed, inquisitive script that lets the players act like their seemingly shallow selves but nonetheless reveal their hidden layers and their much wider humanity.

Linklater's credentials for capturing growing up, already firmly established thanks to Boyhood, are further evidenced here, along with male bonding rituals galore.

However, he pays a price for taking the plotless approach to what sometimes seems like an endless hanging-out party. And that is: IT'S AN ENDLESS HANGING-OUT PARTY.

That said, however, it's the repartee, always a Linklater strength, that holds and amuses us. And by the time we exit, we know most of the characters at least a bit better than we did going in.

So we'll take batting practice with 2½ stars out of 4. With more hits than errors, Everybody Wants Some!! is an affecting and endearing ensemble comedy, a baseball diamond in the rough.

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