Movie Review: Mid90s
Photo Credit: Mid90s
Mid90s is a movie that was released this past fall, in October of 2018, that was written and produced by Jonah Hill, although Hill doesn’t appear in the movie. The movie is about a young kid named Stevie, also given the nickname Sunburn, who is growing up in Southern California and becomes friends with an older group of skaters, who I assume most of them are late high school. Apparently Stevie is 13 years in the movie even though I’m not sure this is ever mentioned, I only saw this on Wikipedia. Even the actor that play him, Sunny Suljic, is 13 yrs old, but given how often kids in movies are player by much older characters, Stevie looks like he’s about 10 yrs old. The plot of the movie is that Stevie is a child of a struggling single mother and has an older brother that pays him zero attention other than when he is getting beat up by him. Stevie doesn’t seem to really have any friends so one day when he is out, he comes across a skate shop with a group of guys hanging out and skating around, and from that moment he is willing to do anything to fit in. After this Stevie goes all out to learn to skate, though he never becomes good at it, and eventually joins the clique. It’s basically a coming of age film, or essentially a story of a kid becoming a teenager, rather quite aggressively. While Stevie’s mom isn’t the biggest fan of the group of friends he has chosen, in the end a series of events unfolds that leads her to realize that his group of older friends truly cares about Stevie and it’s sort of a reconciliation. The ending scene of the movie is a short video that one of the guys from the group had put together with snippets their skating and hanging out over the past few months. I didn’t want to give way too much information but that’s essentially the gist of the movie.
Few Thoughts
There are no big name actors in the movie, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing it’s just funny that the biggest named actor in the movie is Na-Kel Smith who is actually a pro skater. Also, it is cool and adds to the realness of the movie as they obviously do all the actual skating in the movie.
Big swing and miss on the soundtrack to this movie. I mean the title of the movie is Mid90s and the only song that was recognizable was “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” by Nirvana, which was faintly played for a brief moment. The 90’s were filled with so much great music that could have fit this movie so they definitely dropped the ball there.
The main character Stevie, looking no older than about 10 or 11 really threw me off the whole movie. I know that the actor that played Stevie was 13 and he was portrayed to be 13, but come on, the dude was throwing back 40s of beer and doing drugs like it was no problem. I don’t know, maybe Cali kids are just different but I felt it would have been a lot more believable had he at least been a couple of years older, at least in high school.
Also it made no sense to me that Stevie randomly became friends with this group of older kids by showing up to their skate shop and kind of barging through the back door to sit down and watch them skate. It would have made a lot more sense had the connection been made the first time Stevie went to the skate shop.
The movie also could have used better character development. I assumed most were high school age but what about Na-Kel, did he own the skate shop or did they just work for the most lax owner in the world that didn’t care if they left the store midday to go skating lol.
Overall, the movie was okay, but I felt like it had so much more potential. They could have killed it with the soundtrack and made this movie so much more nostalgic and also could have made it a lot more believable had Stevie not looked 10. It’s definitely worth a watch if you have some free time, just to see if you like it. I doubt I would go out of my way to watch it again though.
Grade 2/5
Thanny