Mark Reviews Movies: FIRST DATE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 1, 2021

All Mike (Tyson Brown) wants is to ask out the girl on whom he has had a crush for, likely, years. He's a bit quiet and plenty shy, though, so when Kelsey (Shelby Duclos) actually suggests they hang out for the night, everything seems to be going according to a plan beyond his most hopeful dreams.

First Date actually begins with another guy on the phone, desperately asking the woman he's dating to run away with him to Mexico—a hypothetical conversation they had, after a few drinks, on their first date. While she thinks about it on the other end of the line, we hear a commotion in the guy's house, some angry people knocking on his bedroom door, and single gunshot. The bullet rips through the door and ends up in the guy's chest. As life leaves him, the woman returns to the phone with some bad news about their relationship. Isn't that just the way the universe can add insult to injury?

That's the philosophy behind writers/directors Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp's movie, a debut feature for both filmmakers. Things may seem bad, but they always can and often will become worse.

Mike, for example, is nervous about and ill-prepared for his surprisingly good fortune. His friend Brett (Josh Fesler), the first of many aggressively quirky characters who come and go throughout this story, believes the answer is simple. Mike just needs a car, and the date can at least happen.

With his parents taking the family van on a weekend trip to Las Vegas, Mike is going to have to find an alternative. Brett already has found a used car for sale online, and while it'll cost Mike all of his savings (plus a few hundred bucks that he'll "borrow" from his parents), it's at least an answer.

Everything that follows Mike's decision to buy the car is bad and only becomes worse. There is, admittedly, a twisted and cynical logic to Crosby and Knapp's plot, which involves the accidental killing during the prologue, a group of criminals with a strange sense of priority, one abduction that eventually leads to a couple more, a pair of cops who always seem to be one step behind Mike, an obscene amount of cocaine, and the car our protagonist buys.

The car, by the way, isn't the one Dennis (Scott Noble), a seller of all kinds of questionably obtained things, advertised online, which should have been Mike's first hint that this was an unwise decision. As the quiet and shy teenager that he is, though, Mike doesn't like confrontation. Plus, he has that date with the girl of his dreams to uphold.

To explain the rest of the plot would be pointless, because so much of it involves details and events that have almost nothing to do with Mike and his long, winding trek to pick up Kelsey at her house. Most of it involves the dead guy from the start, as well as his still-living accomplices. They're led by a man known only as "the Captain" (Jesse Janzen), who cannot stand even perceived rudeness but has no qualms torturing a guy with an electric drill for information.

The rest of the gang is made up of incompetents of various stripes, who probably spend more time debating the book club they also participate in than the particulars of the kidnapping/drug deal/hunt for the car Mike bought. Dennis, by the way, is the man they're holding captive, and his trigger-happy and later concussed wife Darla (Leah Finity), who believes Mike has something to do with Dennis' disappearance, is searching for him.

Yes, this screenplay is more than a bit of a jumble—intentionally so, since the whole point is how much can go wrong for Mike without him being aware of the mess into which he's gotten himself, but also with just enough randomness that it too often feels as if the filmmakers are laying it on as thickly as possible. The assorted side players—from the criminals, to those two cops (played by Nicole Berry and Samuel Ademola), to Mike's acquaintances, to just about anyone else who shows up here—are broadly drawn caricatures and broadly off-putting in how they solely exist to add a dense layer of eccentricity to this story.

Some of these characters are amusing (The random appearance of an older couple who once owned the car is a stretch, both as a dead-end for humor and the contrivance of it for the plot). Collectively, they leave the impression of Crosby and Knapp trying too hard to add a wacky energy to material that's already pretty hectic.

On the positive side, the climax, which escalates from multi-party standoff to chaotic shootout (before resolving with a chase/fight), is staged with orderly mayhem, and Brown's understated performance makes for a sensible foil to the movie's assorted excesses (One could argue that he and his character are overshadowed by everything and everyone else). The excesses of First Date, though, are simply too much.

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