It’s time for another review of a screener movie I was sent!

Today’s film comes to us from the writer/director Kris McMenamin, and it is called Misfits. It’s your run-of-the-mill Christmas/Wrestling/Family Drama/Coming Of Age story about a group of lifelong friends who lose each other in their early 20’s / late teens, but end up all coming back together when one of them needs them most… and there is some professional wrestling. You know, that old chestnut.

Our protagonists start off as a bunch of teenagers who are sneaky and up to little good, but they aren’t really bad at heart. They sing Christmas carols for older folks in the hopes of getting “donations”, and occasionally lift candy bars from convenience stores. But they all care for each other. As their teenage years are coming to an end, two of them (Spencer and Ryan) leave their hometown and travel to California in the hopes of making it respectively as a writer and an actor. This causes the break-up of the relationship between Ryan and Becca.

Eleven years later, Josh and Sandy are married with two kids, and Sandy is sick with an undisclosed medical condition which brings everyone back together. As Ryan tries to sort out his relationship with and feelings for Becca, Josh’s life and struggles are compounded by bills and an imminent foreclosure on the home in which they have raised their daughters.

With Christmas coming up, how will the gang find a way to help Josh out?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ There is a lot of heart to this story, with a group of lifelong friends all banding together to support one another through hard times. It’s endearing and sweet and makes the whole movie work because you really end up caring about Josh and his family… both blood family and chosen family. 

It was hard to see where the story was going to progress to in the early going, but when we get to Josh and Sandy and their daughters in the formers’ adult years, everything starts taking shape before the viewers’ eyes. We see the conflict coming, and we get to start empathizing with the characters more.

And the third act is a lot of fun. The climactic wrestling match is a treat, and the movie introduces kind of a “magic of Christmas” element to things that could have derailed a film with less of a soul. But here it actually works and feels earned. Even my coal-like heart was warmed when we see it.

+ Misfits gets better in terms of acting as it goes along. It genuinely feels like everyone settled into their roles in the later scenes and made better choices after a somewhat rough first half hour or so. But as the picture moves, everyone works better and the chemistry rises between them. The actors become their on-screen personas.

I’m going to talk more about this in a second, but the first act of Misfits sees the picture alternate between times in the past of the characters’ lives. It’s possible it was that switching things up that made the acting feel a bit harsher in the beginning, as the younger actors playing the 2006 version of our protagonists were not the strongest. But they end up getting dropped, allowing the older versions to rise to prominence and fall into their roles.

– As noted above, in the first act, the movie jumps around in time and is very non-sequitur as it hops about and shows the characters at various points in their lives. It’s not a brand new concept, but it’s a good storytelling convention that makes the movie feel unpredictable. Unfortunately, we lose this trick of storytelling after the first act and the plot becomes more sequential. I’d have liked to have seen the early method be kept up. 

I know I said above that the time-jumping may have affected my ability to relate to the acting, so maybe it was for the best in some ways that this was abandoned. But as a facet of telling this tale, I appreciated it for keeping me on my toes and forcing me to learn who the characters were and how they had developed over the intervening years.

– Director Kris McMenamin is a young talent who may have a bright future ahead of him, but there are some growing pains in this one from him. There is some choppy editing from cut to cut at times, and the sound mixing could stand to be a little better because there is some background noise in some scenes. This could come down to the equipment that the team could afford, but it’s still there.

This is the kind of stuff that can be gotten over with time, experience, and bigger budgets. I don’t like to hold it against newer filmmakers, but I’d be lying if I said they weren’t elements that were there and distracted me from my enjoyment of the effort. And you have to take the Downs the movie gives you.

OVERALL

Misfits is a surprising Christmas outing that has its heart and soul in the right place, and it’s an effort that gets better as you watch it. It’s hard to fault a film that does that. It has some flaws that come with inexperience, sure, but I’d definitely be in to see where the members involved in this go from here.