Monday Movie Review: The Peanut Butter Falcon
Dude. I am on a role with the kickass movies lately. After the awesomeness of both The Farewell and Blinded by the Light, I wasn’t sure how another indie movie was going to compete, but The Peanut Butter Falcon was another almost perfect film.
The Peanut Butter Falcon is about a boy with Down Syndrome named Zak (Zack Gottsagen) who has been sent to live in a retirement home because he is a ward of the state and there is nowhere else for him to go. He is desperate to become a professional wrestler, so he breaks out of the home in the middle of the night and heads off to find the Saltwater Redneck’s (Thomas Haden Church) wrestling school. Zak has no supplies and is wearing nothing but his underwear, but when he comes across Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), who is on the run after setting a crabbing dock on fire, the two team up to get Zak to his wrestling school and Tyler to Florida where he can be safe from the men who are hunting him down for revenge. Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), who works at the retirement home and has a special friendship with Zak, eventually finds them. Zak doesn’t want to go with her so he throws her car keys in the ocean, forcing Eleanor to join them on their journey to find the Saltwater Redneck.
There aren’t a lot of negatives in this film, so let’s just get them out of the way. The whole thing starts slowly. I was iffy about it for probably the first twenty to thirty minutes. But once it picked up, I was all in, it just took a little longer than I would have liked to get me there. The only other thing that irritated me was I had some trouble understanding some of LaBeouf’s dialogue. He’s got a pretty thick Southern accent in the film and many times I had no idea what he was actually saying.
What I loved about this movie is how it’s all about found family. Each of the three main characters don’t have family of their own, and the way they come together create their own family is perfect. Something about a found family always gets to me and I found their trio to be incredibly heart-warming. The entire cast turns in pretty solid performances, though I think LaBeouf and Gottsagen are the clear standouts. The story is good and well-written, though I maybe would have liked to go a little bit deeper into some of the back story of the main three. Overall, it was an enjoyable movie that left me going awww. And honestly, sometimes that’s all I want out of a movie! I give this one an A-.
In other news, there are so many good movies coming out in the next few months, I hope I have time to see them all! What are you looking forward to seeing?
