When I first saw the trailer for Everybody Wants Some I thought that it looked like a surface level average comedy set in the 1980s. That was until I found out the director was Richard Linklater. Linklater first gained notoriety as a director with his interesting and unique indie movie Slacker (1991). His followup to Slacker was a more traditional movie called Dazed and Confused which became a major cult hit. According to Linklater Everybody Wants Some serves as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused which makes a lot of sense. Unfortunatley I don’t think it was quite as good as Dazed and Confused.
Everybody Wants Some is about college freshman Jake (Blake Jenner) who has just arrived at college in the Fall of 1980 in Texas. He has a scholarship playing baseball and moves into one of the two houses that the baseball team uses. At first the guys on the team don’t quite accept him because he is a pitcher, but eventually they start to take him under their wing. For the whole movie we really just follow Jake and the other guys as they wander around drinking and trying to get laid. It might sound kind of surface level but there is some real heart in the movie if you look deep enough.
Everybody Wants Some is a lot like Dazed and Confused in that it has a pretty slim plot. We experience most of what is going on through the eyes of the main character Jake. Jenner is pretty good as Jake although with him being the person taking in all the new experiences we never really get to know him as a full character. One actor in the movie I was really impressed with was Tyler Hoechlin who plays the alpha-male of the team McReynolds. Hoechlin is best known for playing the brooding character Derek Hale on the modern TV show version of Teen Wolf. Playing McReynolds he really shows that he can be more of a chameleon than I had once thought. I didn’t even realize it was him until the credits rolled. Sure he was camouflaged in his 1970s hairdo and mustache, but he really showed a ton of potential and it should be interesting to see what else he does especially since he was rumored to play a younger Batman at one point before Ben Affleck got the role.
I think the main reason why I think Everybody Wants Some isn’t as good as Dazed and Confused is because there isn’t quite enough variety of characters and small sub-plots. Dazed and Confused had an assortment of different characters that we weave in and out of and we just don’t get that here. Everybody Wants Some kind of feels like what it would be like if we just got to follow around the football players in Dazed and Confused. Don’t get me wrong though. Even though all the main characters are jock baseball players they aren’t human cliches of what we usually see as jocks in movies. The movie actually does a pretty good job at distinguishing the characters on the baseball team and breaks the stereotype that all jocks are dumb.
Another thing that seems a little off about this movie is that it has no real antagonist. In Dazed and Confused we had the a-hole antagonist characters played by Ben Affleck as king a-hole Fred O’Bannion and Parker Posey as queen bitch as Darla Marks. Both movies take place in a limited amount of time with Dazed and Confused only being one day and Everybody Wants Some being a few days. I find it interesting and even a little frustrating that Linklater chose not to have any real antagonist characters even though more time takes place in Everybody Wants Some. It’s possible that he figured the character Jake was new to college and didn’t know everyone well enough to know who the antagonist would be. Jake clashes a little bit with another freshman pitcher named Billy (Will Brittain) but it never really leads to anything which just felt odd.
I know I am comparing this movie to Dazed and Confused a lot but it is hard not to considering how similar they are and just how much of a cult classic Dazed and Confused has become in the last 23 years. Even with all it’s faults I really enjoyed watching this Everybody Wants Some. It is a fun and unique coming of age story with a lot of colorful characters. Most people will watch the trailer and think it is just another dumb comedy, but if they give it a chance they will realize that there is a lot more layers. The whole movie is basically about Jake experiencing new things and trying to discover himself and all that is done in cool and interesting ways.
Dave’s Rating- ★★★½(3½) out of ★★★★★(5)
