The Last Summer (Film Review)

Directed by: William Bindley; Written by William and Scott Bindley
Starring: KJ Apa, Maia Mitchell, Jacob Latimore, Halston Sage, and Sosie Bacon
Running Time: 109 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 0/10

Ever seen a stock photo? They're tailor made for kids' high-school power-point presentations. Or maybe you're the kid. Then you definitely know what a stock photo is! It's a photo of actors taking part in a facsimile of an actual human interaction--like an overly-filtered romantic couple sitting on a bench before a sunset or a diverse group of people all stacking their hands together in a team-building exercise. The main purpose of a stock photo is to quickly convey a simple idea in the most generic fashion possible. Stock photos are inherently boring and uninteresting.
The Last Summer is Stock Photo: The Movie.

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Griffin and Phoebe and Alec and Erin and a bunch of other kids just graduated high school. You may have just wistfully goofed off during the summer before college (I did...and all the summers during college...and even the one after, though that one included crippling depression!), but for these kids it's A VERY BIG DEAL. It's THE LAST SUMMER.
You may have also graduated with kids who then went to community college, nursing school, maybe the local state college, the military. Perhaps one kid, maybe two got into somewhere crazy. Not the kids in The Last Summer, though. These extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely average kids all got into whatever fancy-ass college they wanted to, and their second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth choices, too. Lori Loughlin may have had to bribe her kids' way into USC, but the kids in The Last Summer just have to shoot footage of their classmates talking about their post-school plans, make a montage, set it to dubstep--and voila, you're a Trojan, kid!
So already, none of these kids are living anything resembling a normal life, exempting the token poor (i.e. normal person), who announces late in the film she is gonna live her ill-defined dreams. The movie can't even bother with announcing what those dreams are, simply thinking it's enough that people have them, so this character saying that she's going to follow them is enough.
The film attempts to place its actors into moving stock photos, like holding hands and watching fireworks, or kissing in a lake. They are given interactions and placed into interactions because that's what happens in these movies. I am not even being cynical here. The film literally appears to be positing these situations as things because they happen in movies. The two artiest kids circle around each other, break up due to a misunderstanding, then get back together. One couple breaks up at the beginning of the summer, only to get back together at the end of the summer because. The two nerds, signified as nerds because they like Harry Potter, and--you know what? How lazy is that? Harry Potter is about as mainstream as it gets. The movies made $6.5 billion dollars. The series has its own theme park. Name-dropping that the "nerd kids" like Harry Potter is literally the only "work" The Last Summer does to let you know they are nerds. This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen.
Anyway, the two nerds kids find a downtown bar that doesn't card, and they start romances with 20-something businesswomen nerds who also like Harry Potter because this is that kind of movie. The worst part is, as one of the "nerds," Jacob McCarthy shows that if he were placed in a competent film about a young man who is in over his head in a world of experienced adults, he would shine. He's too good for this creepy six-minute subplot.
Also too good for this is Maia Mitchell, as the burgeoning filmmaker, Phoebe. Mitchell was excellent in last year's Never Goin' Back, hilarious, magnetic, and imminently likable. Here, she's reduced to spouting cliches and delivering incredibly awkward come ons, including having to somehow segue a messy barbecue chow-down into tender, respectful, completely sexless, church-bulletin-lit, stock-photo sex. Mitchell deserves better.
You will be forgiven if your first question upon hearing The Last Summer's title is, "Is this a horror film?" It only needs an I Know What You Did in place of the definite article to be a 90's slasher flick.  However, if the future of cinema is determined by whatever algorithm determined The Last Summer, I'll take the fish hook guy.