Starring: Jay Towns, Trey Mendlik, Ben Ruettiger
Director: Mike Spears
Country: USA
At a US college, Jamal (Towns) is a promising basketball player teetering on the verge of signing a professional contract. Trevor (Mendlik) is a reporter on the college’s TV channel, who interviews Jamal following a game. Later, the pair unwittingly meet via an online hookup, embarking on an increasingly intense affair, despite the former being in full denial about his sexuality.
Peppered with original songs, this flimsy narrative is made all the weaker by utterly generic songs that are thrown in at literally any moment the characters experience emotion. Its title declares it’s a “modern musical”, but its tendency to use song only to reflect character-points is actually remarkably old-fashioned. And seeing vanilla-Trevor doing dance routines dressed in baseball caps and sports’ fetish-wear is more than just a sprinkling of ridiculous.
The script is utterly terrible. With dialogue so simplistic it feels like it was “written” by AI, it stumbles across every cliché in the book, finding no depth in its characters or any potential in its narrative. For a story in which a lot happens, we never really get anywhere, with either quiet introspection utterly overblown or massive plot points blunted and downplayed. And precisely nothing in between. And the enormously exaggerated score serves only to make you squirm in your seat.
Clearly, the film’s budget has been spent on its musical numbers, forgetting about everything else that makes for a successful film. Character, plot, visuals and script have all been hastily assembled by a filmmaker that clearly hasn’t a clue how to tell a story. Subsequently, Good Enough is absolutely not good enough at all. Not even close.
UK Release: Out now on VOD, released by Dekkoo.
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