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My friend recently showed me the movie SLC Punk. It’s about two punks who live in Salt Lake City and the scene in general. I guess because of the subject matter and the humorous characters, my friend thought I would like it. In fact, he enjoyed it quite a bit and he has no sympathy for punks at all. While I agree that the characters were funny and the movie is mildly entertaining, overall, the movie sucks. I was pretty derided because of my opinion at the time so I’ve decided to write my reasons here. If you haven’t seen the movie and it sounds interesting, stop here. You might find it entertaining enough, but if your like me it wont be worth a second viewing or a critical review.

• The main character is completely unlikable. He is a rich kid who’s dad drives a Porsche and lives in a nice house. He got good grades in college without even trying and got into Harvard without even applying. In the end it seems like the only reason he was punk was an immature prolonged rebellion towards his parents.
• The whole movie is a ripoff of Trainspotting but instead of being great, it sucks. Instead of it being a slice of life movie about the heroin subculture in Scotland, its about the punk subculture in SLC. Even the friend who is in love and doesn’t do drugs but dies because of drugs is copied. And in the end when the main character decides to be a productive member of society? In Trainspotting, he does it without the lame rationalization.
• The number one rule in movie making is that every scene should move the story forward. It would be interesting to time it, but it seemed like almost half the movie was spent introducing characters and explaining the scene. If I had gotten a hold of the script I would of scribbled show, don’t tell on every page.
• The characters are unevenly defined. Other than the main character the person we know the most about is the Russian drug dealer and he dissapears half way through. A minute is spent introducing the girl who takes medication when she only appears for 10 seconds on screen in her only scene after her intro. On the other hand we know almost nothing about Bob’s girlfriend or med girl’s brother. Both of which end up being extremely important to Bob and Stevo later on.

There’s a bunch of other stuff about this movie that sucked that I didn’t like but I’m not going to waste anymore of my time writing about SLC Punk.  If you want to try to defend this movie you can do it in the comments.