I’m just gonna get it out of the way. I’ve never read the book. I hear it’s supposed to be a really good book for teens, and I don’t know how closely the script follows the book. But what did I think of this movie? After all, it’s getting some pretty sweet reviews. Well, I know you’ll probably want to crucify me for saying this, but I think it’s pretty overrated.

Charlie (Logan Lerman) is a freshman at high school, looking for friends he can call his own. He ends up finding them in the form of Patrick (Ezra Miller) and his sister Sam (a stand out performance by Emma Watson) But things get tricky when Sam starts to fall for him and Patrick turns out to be gay. Wow, we really do need to talk about Kevin. This is all interwoven with flashbacks of his aunt’s death, which is…..weird.

This is one of those movies that doesn’t really do anything wrong, but fails to bring anything really special or new to the plate. The main problem I have is in the way they depict high school. I’m in my freshman year of high school myself, and based on what I’ve heard about the book, I thought that this would be a very realistic protrayal. As a freshman, I can tell you that High School isn’t nearly this rough. If a kid knows the answer to a question that all the others don’t, that kid is not a geek. Hey, he knows the answer. Good for him. And kids don’t use bad language all the time. Maybe I’m biased a little bit. Maybe this is the way most high school freshmen act, and I’m just the loser who writes a blog about movies. I’m sorry, but if this movie is so bent on being in a realistic style, yet no movie or television show I’ve ever seen accurately portrays high school. It’s also really boring and slow at times.

That doesn’t mean everything in this movie is bad. The acting is nice, the score is pretty good, and Emma Watson really nails her American accent. But this movie becomes so borderline boring and I don’t know if the highlights are worth it. A lot of the critics really liked this movie, and I respect their opinion. Maybe I would have liked it better if I had read the book. But as it stands? Yawn.

**1/2