Dave Franco premieres this week on Amazon Prime Video his new film, An Old Acquaintance (Somebody I Used to Know), his second feature film as a director after having debuted in 2020 with Guarded (The Rental).
His first movie was a horror thriller that did not arouse many passions but from which it was said that some interesting idea could be extracted. With Somebody I Used to Know, Dave Franco shows that perhaps the best thing would be to have a good script as a starting pointto then polish everything else, and that it would not take more than an hour and a half to be a higher quality product.
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Somebody I Used to Know amazon prime video trailer
In his new feature film, Dave Franco changes genre, going from horror to romantic comedy, but keeping Alison Brie as the leading actress of fiction. Although the tape begins with the cancellation of a program, which could well be a criticism of streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, you soon realize that the film does not have great pretensions.
An old acquaintance introduces us to a lonely woman -who logically should be accompanied by a cat-, who is told that after the second season of the program she was directing, it will surely be cancelled. Ally He decides to go to his mother’s house for a few days, and returning to the home where you grew up implies that you will surely meet old acquaintances in the neighborhood.
An old ex-boyfriend (Jay Ellis), there is an attempt at a passionate night, but his plans are frustrated when the next day he discovers that he already has another girlfriend (Kiersey Clemons) with whom he is going to marry. Things get even more complicated when the groom’s mother asks him to please record the event, since she is a professional in the world.
Who will end the boy? Not even going all the way to find out is too interesting. What’s more, Dave Franco thinks that by focusing on the learning that the character extracts from Alison Brie Kiersey Clemons’s for reminding her of herself as a young woman is giving us a much more groundbreaking script.
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And the truth is that no, there are no great life lessons, nor great revelations, and practically everything that these lines say about the plot of the film is the same as what its official synopsis says in two sentences, but that Dave Franco bothers to extend to 107 minutes.
When the script has failed, because it is a conventional story without much appeal, the only hope left is to review its formal section. Unfortunately, technically has the same TV movie packaging as the plot.
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His audiovisual language is flat and inexpressive. All the scenes have uniform lighting, classic framing, situations that are resolved without too many complications. It does not invent anything, it does not contribute anything, and the whole is hardly entertaining.
There are montage sequences when they have to be, there is a scene with the protagonist singing when he plays a musical number, there are different degrees of comedy and drama balancing the plot – if this very basic humor can be called comedy and drama something that you see come and with what you do not empathize-.
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an old acquaintance It is a totally dispensable film, only suitable for a Sunday afternoon if you have already exhausted the rest of the options available in Amazon Prime Video.
To get some positive point out of it, an effort is made to offer various settings, both indoors and outdoors, and a cast that goes beyond the main love triangle –with some familiar faces such as Haley Joel Osment or Danny Pudi-; He doesn’t do badly, but he can’t shine in a movie like this either.
Dave Franco premieres in the Amazon Prime Video catalog his romantic comedy, An Old Acquaintance, on Friday, February 10, 2023.
