{"id":47007,"date":"2020-06-15T20:21:14","date_gmt":"2020-06-16T00:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=47007"},"modified":"2020-06-15T20:21:19","modified_gmt":"2020-06-16T00:21:19","slug":"the-king-of-staten-island-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2020\/06\/the-king-of-staten-island-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The King of Staten Island \u2013 Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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            Back in 2015, director Judd Apatow briefly turned comedian Amy Schumer into a movie star with \u201cTrainwreck,\u201d a semiautobiographical film where the protagonist\u2019s actions were fictionalized, but much of the dialogue, situations, and character traits were taken from Schumer\u2019s own life. Now Apatow hopes to find similar success with Pete Davidson in \u201cThe King of Staten Island,\u201d where Davidson plays a fictionalized version of himself and has conversations he\u2019s probably had in some form in his personal life. Even though the film is based on the real life of an individual with a unique story to tell, the film still can\u2019t feel anything but formulaic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Davidson plays Scott Carlin, a 24-year-old slacker with a myriad of mental health issues, many of which are related to the death of his firefighter father (killed in a nondescript hotel fire and not in the 9\/11 attacks like Davidson\u2019s real father) when he was a child. He spends his days hanging out with his friends, annoying his widowed mother Margie (Marisa Tomei) and sister Claire (Maude Apatow), and taking his girlfriend Kelsey (Bel Powley) for granted. He won\u2019t get a job or take his relationship seriously because he figures people with his emotional baggage shouldn\u2019t be in the workforce or making a partner miserable (that\u2019s his excuse for his laziness, anyway). The closest thing he has to an aspiration is to become a tattoo artist, and even to this he doesn\u2019t really commit, practicing goofy designs of his choice on anyone who\u2019s willing to offer up their skin\u2026 including a nine-year-old boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The boy\u2019s father is Ray (Bill Burr), a firefighter who is none to happy about the damage done to his underage son. He shows up at Scott\u2019s house to yell at him, but meets Margie at the door, and doesn\u2019t feel like yelling at her. In fact, he\u2019s soon asking her out for coffee, and the two pursue a relationship. This does not sit well with Scott, who doesn\u2019t like Ray and is opposed to his mother dating another fireman. He doesn\u2019t even approve of firemen dating anybody, since there may come a day where they don\u2019t come home to their loved ones, a belief he is only too happy to share with Ray and his chief (Steve Buscemi).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            With Ray quickly becoming a stronger presence in the household, and Margie wanting to give him a push anyway, Scott soon finds himself fighting to retain his effort-free existence. It shouldn\u2019t be a spoiler to say that he is going to have to learn a few things about responsibility, the way Seth Rogen\u2019s character did in quintessential Apatow comedy \u201cKnocked Up.\u201d Really, it\u2019s the same arc all protagonists go through if they\u2019re established as lazy at the beginning of a movie. Supposedly this one is different because it has touches of Davidson\u2019s real-life story and personality thrown in, but I\u2019m sorry, going by this movie I would think that Davidson\u2019s life was only averagely exciting at best and downright uninteresting at worst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cThe King of Staten Island\u201d boasts dedicated performances from Burr, Buscemi, Powley, Tomei, and even Davidson when he\u2019s not doing tired stoner schtick. The script is often funny and sometimes poignant in later stages, but as with many Apatow movies, there\u2019s too much of it (do we really need a whole sequence to establish that the immature Scott has a \u201ctalent\u201d for fitting in at drug-fueled college parties?), especially for a story this tired. Maybe it\u2019s that Apatow has gone to this well too many times or that something isn\u2019t firing right with the unproven Davidson, but for the second week in a row I\u2019m reviewing a movie that went straight to On Demand, and for the second week in a row I get the feeling that the movie wouldn\u2019t have been able to survive long in theaters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grade: C<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe King of Staten Island\u201d is available On Demand through online streaming services and likely through your local cable provider. The film is rated R for language and drug use throughout, sexual content and violence\/bloody images. Its running time is 136 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver             Back in 2015, director Judd Apatow briefly turned comedian Amy Schumer into a movie star with \u201cTrainwreck,\u201d a semiautobiographical film where the protagonist\u2019s actions were fictionalized,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":47008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47007"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}