"NEVER GOIN' BACK".........GIRLS GONE WILDLY STUPID.........

Never Goin' Back (2018)   The accumulated I.Q. of all the characters in this film combined would still come out less than that of one single Trumpanzee rally attendee........

               Oh, God help us for enjoying this tiny little nothing of a movie........

               But compared to the usual navel-gazing, self-obsessed, Millennial-Angst indie films we've suffered through, this one's a goddamned dope-filled breath of fresh air.......

                 (You can take that both ways, in that it's filled with dopes.....smoking dope. .....)

                 Our heroines, so to speak.......two 16 year old girls,( Maia Mitchell, Camilla Morrone) well on their way to useless, wasted lives. BFFs forever, high school dropouts and pancake house waitresses, their primary goals in life, are getting high and going to the beach.......where they dream of eating donuts and getting high.

                  If you suspect it's impossible to build an entire movie around two such idiots, you haven't been watching enough independent films......

                  There's more than enough going on here.......with the girls' limited goals constantly thwarted by the equally brain-dead boys who hang around with them.......a jaw dropping collection of dim bulbs.

                   And that's about all that needs explanation here, as we watch the two girls and their imbecilic coterie make an ever escalating series of bad choices.  For the most part, the film's content to extract its comedy by simply observing the natural behavior of these dolts........until it takes an active part in the proceedings, throwing in epic bowel movements and projectile vomiting to move the story along......

                   Normally, we'd weep for the future of the world at the sight of these characters........but writer-director Augustine Frizzell says she based it on her own chaotic adolescence.  So who knows........if we're optimistic enough, we can imagine the aimless, worthless teen years of Mitchell and Morrone's characters lead them, like Frizzell, to better things.......

                   And as we mentioned, we did get a kick out of watching it. Frizzell's a genunine talent in her handling of the actors........Mitchell and Morrone tear through the movie with chemistry and energy to spare.......they're simultaneously a millennial-moron version of Thelma and Louise and Laverne and Shirley.......and never anything less than real and hilarious.

                  The fact that the movie has no real insights or interests in the monumentally stupid behavior on display annoyed a fair amount of critics.  But that's the very reason we couldn't take our eyes off it........it's happy to just serve as some fast, funny time spent with some people you'd just as soon avoid in real life.

                   Call it the new, updated guilty pleasure version of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun".......We'll call out 3 stars (***) for a movie we'd take anytime over those 1000 crappy indies about wandering millennials who re-visit their hometowns........