The Descendants Movie Review
I will say to start that this movie title is causing my brain some confusion, as in my mind the Descendants will always be a punk rock band I still listen to a lot. Some of their songs include My Dad Sucks, Weinerschnitzel, Suburban Home, Kabuki Girl, and I Don’t Want to Grow Up. It’s hard to place them in what kind of punk rock they are exactly. Sort of if the Vandals and the Dead Milkmen married and had a baby that actually sang punk rock songs instead of songs about being punk rock. Hard core with a sense of gallows humor, I guess.
Anyway, the Descendants the movie. This is the latest George Clooney film. I am sort of a fan of George Clooney, mainly for Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?, but honestly he will have to do about 10 more films of that quality to ever make up for 
starring in Batman and Robin (Batman and Robin image courtesy of the Batman T Shirt category). Yes, the Batnipple Batman. Looking over his filmography he seems to have no barometer for what a good script is. For every Oh, Brother or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind he has he seems to have a Spy Kids or Ocean’s Eleven (Twelve, Thirteen…). It’s like he has someone rank scripts by quality and then picks them with a metronome.
So I guess this could be considered one of his better films. It definitely features him coming to grips with stuff, and having emotions and all that. His acting is indeed excellent, as is the supporting cast. The dramatic scenes are gripping and real, yet there is a nice undertone of humor in the grief shown on screen.
It is the story of Mathew King, Hawaiian lawyer and head of a family trust that holds 25,000 of pristine Kauai real estate. His wife was just in a boating accident and lies in a coma in the hospital. He has to wrangle his two troubled daughters while dealing with her impending death (she has a living will) and the fact that she was cheating on him. Meanwhile, as the head of the trust he has to decide what to do with the huge property. He goes on a journey across the island letting relatives know what is going on while looking for answers as to who his wife was cheating with with his daughters (Shailene Woodley-the Secret Life of the American Teenager, An American Girl Adventure and Amara Miller-no other credits) and an annoying surfer kid named Sid (Nick Krause-How to Eat Fried Worms, Stoned Age) who tags along as the older girl’s friend (or boyfriend. Not really clear).
So there is a ton of good character development and fairly engrossing emotional scenes. Overall a decent film, but if I were to offer one major criticism (and, as any regular reader knows, I will) it’s that the film seems to lack focus. It is called the Descendants mainly because King and his fairly huge family are supposed to be direct descendants of King Kamehameha, and the main drama seems to want to revolve around the dispensation of the land the family holds, but that whole aspect of the film has to sit at the back of the bus. The obvious main focus is the coma and impending death of Kings wife and the mother of his daughters, but that seems to get shunted aside to make room for his quest to find her lover. Meanwhile, the subplot of dealing with the fact that his daughters are troubled and looking to end up arrested dries up and blows away. The search for her former lover drives the movie for a while, but then it turns out the lover is somehow involved into the whole giant real estate deal and we are back to the start of the film and the property deal. The whole plot feels kind of like what I would imagine life in Hawaii to be like: a day of wandering aimlessly around an extremely pleasant area while accomplishing not a whole lot. However, if we consider the plot as merely a vehicle for the emotional conveyance than I suppose it works.
The stars. Excellent acting all around, especially George Clooney. Furthermore, the writers worked the script to give him and his daughters more opportunity to display that acting. Two stars. The emotions really drew you in, and you progressed emotionally with the characters. Two stars. Hawaii was beautiful. One star. Instead of showing Hawaii as an amazing paradise for tourists, they showed it as a day to day working environment, with a Hawaiian twist that played well. One star. The humor that flavored the movie worked well. One star. There were a couple of really great scenes, like King running down the hill in his sandals and Sid getting punched out by the grandfather for being an ass. One star. None of the writing or screenplay was directed at the lowest level of American culture (i.e. no hot hula girls dancing or “getting lei’d” jokes). One star. Total: nine stars.
The black holes. The whole script lacking focus thing. One black hole. The movie didn’t so much as end as it ran out of steam and petered out. One black hole. While the acting was good and the emotions clearly delivered, none of the emotional scenes drew me in enough to really have a major impact. I was a little teary watching J Edgar and didn’t get hit once during this film. One black hole. Towards the end Clooney’s character takes a moral stand and makes a speech that seemed to have no foreshadowing whatsoever and more or less coalesced out of the ether. One black hole. This may be a personal issue, but given the current status of our economic and social times I find a film centered around a rich family figuring out the best dispensation of their hundreds of millions of dollars in property to be in really poor taste. One black hole. Total: five black holes.
So a total of four stars. Not bad, IMO, but not really worth rushing out to see. If you are a huge Clooney fan maybe, but otherwise just rent it. In spite of being filmed in one of the most beautiful places on Earth there is nothing on the screen that requires a huge theater. Decent for a date, I guess, as it has a lot of emotional stuff women respond to, but even at age 50 George Clooney will look about 100 times hotter than you ever will so you could potentially suffer in comparison. Especially since he is doing the hot single dad thing.
Thanks for reading. I might go see Arthur Christmas today, but have a lot going on right now. Things are ramping up at work so I might not have the time I did to do so many of these. If I don’t see it I will try to do a list I have been working on. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Thanks again, and have a great day.
Dave
