No. 45 Poor Boy (2016) 69 of 100

 

I was about an hour into this film when I realised that I had no idea whatsoever about what was going on. I did stay the course to the end but it’s certainly not a film that I would recommend or contemplate watching again.

The film opens promisingly with our Man Shannon dressed up as a rodeo clown. His narration makes some pompous and flowery statements before we meet up with the two main protagonists – Poor Boy and Prickface. Poor Boy, who looks like a refugee from ‘Right Said Fred’, gets most of the screen time and the title, but I guess calling your film’ Prickface’ would be a hard sell.

The time frame for the film is undermined but it seems to be a round 2000 as the two lads struggle with an early internet connection and ancient phones. They have various hustles on the go, such as fixing teenage girls’ volleyball matches but it's clear that we are dealing with a couple of red neck losers.

They do however have aspirations and there is a moderately funny sequence when they try online dating with predictably awful results. The crux of the film is when a mysterious, and haggard, woman appears and tries to take the boys’ houseboat from them. In response they try to set up their biggest swindle yet and aspire to escape to California.

At the end we revisit Shannon who is taking off his make up and getting a sub on his wages. The envelope he is given then appears with Poor Boy, who has made it to California; his dreams seemingly realised.

This was a very hard film to follow and that’s not down to it being enigmatic or open to interpretation, it’s just poorly made. It looks like a film school project with different cameras and film stocks in use and techniques like split screens applied once and then not seen again. The lighting and sound make it hard to understand what’s going on and whilst looking a bit arty, it just comes across as a bit of a mess.

It looks like Shannon was involved as a favour and I’d be surprised if he had more than one day on set. He is good as the sad faced clown and initially I thought he was going to be a cypher or an older version of one of the lads looking back on his life. It turns out that he’s the boys’ father and trying to help them out by doing a demeaning job.

The two leads were decent but were hard to like with their mumbling and generally poor behaviour. They weren't funny enough to be likeable and too stupid and morally bankrupt to be invested in.

I read through a lot of reviews trying to make sense of the film and there seems to be no unified opinion about what actually happens. To my mind that’s a failure of the film-maker – viewers aren’t there to try and patch a story out of your random shots and vague slices of character development.

Apart from Shannon doing a decent version of the velvet clown portrait there was not much to like here and it’s definitely not one I’d suggest that you seek out.

When is Shannon-On? - 01.04

Outcome? Taking his make up off and a week down on his wages.

Film 1/5

Shannon Stars 2/5