As the highly anticipated coming of age story for the 2013 summer, The Kings of Summer was woefully underwhelming. Leaving me craving for more than mediocre acting and any definite direction, this film presented itself as a failure to mix the grit of October Boys with laughable quirkiness of Moonrise Kingdom. While it certainly does capture several aspects of the struggles that teens experience on a daily basis, including best friends, girls, sexual orientation, and the difficult task of proving oneself, the momentum of the film almost dully rested on the catchy tunes and the exuberant hilarity of one minor character, Biaggio.
I could add that there were obvious correlations between nature and its battle against civilization (which I must say that nature won out in this one), it would be a stretch to add it to the film’s positive ratio. This being said, the major note of the story was that despite the nature of a teenager to rebel against all adult authority and social construct and the adult resenting them every step of the way in order to mask their own past, the two were paralleled in order to demonstrate the elements of similarity and trust within each age. “We’re all just hungry,” the main teenage character, Joe would say, and the sly slip of similarity was certainly a heavy truth.
I gave The Kings of Summer only two out of five stars as an overall expression of my disappointment. I had been built up to an ideal of how great this movie was going to be and the struggle of such a letdown has only previously been rivaled to that of the original Hangover. Well-constructed as a professional piece, the lack of vision and therefore execution makes me question just who is watching where their money and time are going.
