‘Jack & Diane’ Is A Long-Simmering Disappointment [Tribeca Review]
By Angie Han/April 23, 2012 1:30 pm EST
This year, Gray’s completed Jack & Diane finally made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival. And while much about the film is tough to understand, what’s clear is that Page and Thirlby have dodged a bullet by leaving the project early on.
Jack & Diane starts out promising enough. A creepy vision of hair-rope winding through flesh lends a dark fairy-tale aura, and an opening scene of Diane getting attacked sets up terrors to come. But it’s all downhill from there. Stuffed with slow, pointless scenes that go nowhere and tell us nothing, the 93-minute Jack & Diane feels both interminably long and severely undercooked.
The problems start early. Jack and Diane’s first encounter sees them engaging in halting, half-hearted small talk for what feels like hours before they finally decide to just make out. (In their defense, kissing has to be way more interesting than whatever inane conversation they were having.) The whole scene winds up telling us little about either character or the nature of their attraction to each other and is boring to boot. Yet we’re expected to believe it was a night of such passion that the two are now soulmates.
Gray does show some promise in his treatment of Jack & Diane’s horror-movie side. Gory, mysterious visions like the one that opened the movie recur throughout, and while they get old after a while, they never stop being creepy. There are also a few nice moments of suspense. In one of the movie’s rare highlights, the couple find themselves locked in a pitch-black basement. For several minutes, only the occasional flash of Diane’s disposable camera allows us to see what’s happening, even as one of the girls gets attacked. It’s a tense, genuinely frightening sequence. So it’s hugely disappointing that the werewolf angle builds to nothing at all. I left wondering why it was even brought up in the first place.
On paper, a teen lesbian werewolf romance sounds like a heady combination, or at least the setup for an interesting failure. I give Gray credit for coming up with an unusual twist on the horror and teen romance genres, and for at least trying to do something novel with Jack & Diane. But the sad truth is that all the effort in the world doesn’t guarantee good results. In practice, Gary not only fails to deliver on the premise, he fails to deliver, period.
/Film rating: 3.0 out of 10.0
