Imagine giving total freedom and zero direction to Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Snoop Dogg, Zac Efron and Isla Fischer – letting them do whatever they wanted so they could go crazy. Sounds like a lot of fun, doesn’t it? But it’s far from it. And that’s what happens in The Beach Bum. It’s boring as fuck.
The film plays out like a montage. One bender rolls into the next as McConaughey’s gets drunk and high and stumbles from scene to scene. His character, Moondog, is a former radical poet. As a young man he made a fortune from his revolutionary poetry but now he gets fucked up every day and lives the dream waster lifestyle. However, this isn’t a down and out story. Moondog is not suffering. He loves his drug fuelled existence. It suits him. He revels in it wholeheartedly and parties harder than anyone. Topless women in g-strings offering him spliffs and cocaine are just another day for Moondog. Yet, somehow, it’s boring to watch.
The Beach Bum feels highly derived from party driven films like the Wolf of Wall Street and Boogie Nights. Except The Beach Bum doesn’t show Moondog on the rise and, despite its efforts, it never truly shows him falling. It’s as if someone asked, “what if we stretched one of those two minute party montages from the Wolf of Wall Street out for ninety minutes?” But where the Wolf of Wall Street has conflict and pathos, The Beach Bum has just another party montage.
To be fair to Matthew McConaughey, he is dedicated as Moondog, but honestly I couldn’t give a fuck about what happens to his character. Moondog feels so far-fetched and unrelatable that I zoned out. The rest of the cast – Zac Efron in particular – seem like they went with the most ridiculous idea they could conceive and nobody stopped them. Except for Snoop Dogg. As always, he’s just Snoop Dogg.
The Beach Bum has almost no plot and the first sixty minutes could have been reduced to five. I wouldn’t recommend it.
AaronOnFilm 