Review of The Holdovers

On paper it hit its notes, but there was something wrong with it that I could not articulate. Then I realized. It's a bait and switch. They broke the entire concept of the movie. The entire premise is that they are stuck in the school together, to the point where when the helicopter takes off, you feel a sense of dread that they're now alone, trapped together and must make due, must find grace in the discomfort, learn all those lessons. This is a great premise for a film and it must work in that premise. SUDDENLY, they're going out to bars, to parties, to the city, to insane asylums, to bowling alleys. This is is a problem so fundamentally wrong with the movie it sinks the entire thing in my view. To start with, it's lazy, but artistically, it's cowardly. The helicopter taking off now means nothing because they hit the road regardless. Imagine in The Breakfast Club they escape the school and go on a road trip with ten different stops. It's no longer The Breakfast Club then, it becomes Ferris Bueller's Day Off; as in here, in the Holdover, there is no Holdover to speak of. They aren't trapped in the school, they just go wherever they fancy, with this gigantic god-eye copout of 'well we have a field trip fund so let's throw the screenplay out the window'. Bait and switching the premise is one of my great pet peeves in films, and it's a shame because they set out to make a great film but Payne couldn't help it, he is unable to break out this mold of making road-trip films, and there I was refreshed going in that he was trying something new.

Edit: It has just came out that the screenplay was accused of plagiarizing the script for "Frisco". This to me goes a long way of explaining how forced the structure of the film feels. It is like the tail leading the horse. They mapped out the movie, colored in the lines, and hoped no one would notice that it was copying an entirely different movie. No wonder. A new low for mass produced Hollywood awards bait.