Men, Women, & Children movie review

Article by Gabe Zia

Lazy Film Critic reviews....

Men, Women, & Children follows multiple stories of a bunch of high school students and their parents, mainly revolving around the use of cell phones and social media in their lives. The film stars Jennifer Garner, Dean Norris, Ansel Elgort, Judy Greer, Adam Sandler, Katlyn Denver, Rosemarie Dewitt,  & Emma Thompson. It's directed by Jason Reitman, who also directed Up In the Air, Juno, Thank you for Smoking, & Young Adult.

Ansel Elgort and Kaitlyn Denver in Men, Women, & Children

Now, I'm not one of those people who seems to really take a disliking to the large abundance of social media in our lives, in fact I love it. However, I was willing to forget about that for Men, Women, & Children, in order to try and see the message the film was trying to deliver. However, the movie doesn't really deliver any message. It sometimes loses focus of its message and seemed to drift off into seriously melodramatic moments that just happen to have the internet or a cell phone in them. Really, throughout the entire movie, there weren't a lot of moments that involved social media, save for one out of the dozen sub-plots. This leads to the film not seeming to know what it is, and me not really knowing what I'm watching.

Adam Sandler & Dean Norris in Men, Women, & Children

Like I said, this film follows a lot of sub-plots, ranging from a teen pregnancy, overprotective parents, and depression. Now, having multiple sub-plots in a film is no easy task, and whenever a director gets it right it's usually something to take note of. However, this is not one of those films. Most of the sub-plots are really slow and kind of boring, save for two, those being the one following Adam Sandler and the one following Dean Norris. Both of those two did a pretty good job with their performance, and I found their stories to be interesting and well written. Most of the actors did a decent job with the film, but those two were the only ones I was interested in.

Dean Norris and Judy Greer in Men, Women, & Children

However, this film isn't all bad, in fact it has some kind of decent moments. The main plus this movie has is its use of graphics to show texting and computer screens. These were pretty well done, and looked pretty cool. These graphics are also used in shows like House of Cards and Sherlock to show what someone is texting someone without directly showing the screen, and it's used pretty effectively here. There's some pretty clever moments in the editing in this film as well, for example one scene where the progress bar on a text message being sent is used as a transition to another shot. I wanted more of this in the movie, and it unfortunately wasn't there a whole lot, but was cool enough to mention.

Final Rating
Men, Women & Children has some decent moments, but is overall kind of unfocused. The sub-plots are (mostly) kind of uninteresting and have little to do with the overall idea of the film, which is the use of modern technology and social media in our lives. If you want to see a film about that concept, I'd say go rent "Disconnect", because that film revolves around the same idea, but is way better in its execution.

Men, Women, & Children: 2.3/5