New Unfriended Movie Received Mixed Reviews From Major Critics
Universal Pictures released their new horror/thriller film, “Unfriended,” into theaters this weekend, and all the top, major critics have submitted their reviews. It turns out that they were pretty mixed about it, giving it a an overall 60 score out of a possible 100 across 28 reviews at the Metacritic.com site.
The film stars: Courtney Halverson, Jacob Wysocki, Will Peltz, Shelley Hennig, Renee Olstead, Moses Jacob Storm, and Heather Sossaman. We’ve supplied some blurbs from a couple of the critics,below.
Alonso Duralde at TheWrap, gave it an ok 76 score, saying: ” Unfriended commits to its idea and continually finds new ways to creatively exploit it, building the tension as each character reveals his or her own dark deeds, thus justifying the brutal vendettas visited upon them.”
Claudia Puig from USA Today, gave it a 75 grade, stating: “Blowing this small-screen cyber horror tale out to the big screen makes for fresh and fearsome fun.”
Clark Collis from Entertainment Weekly, gave it a 75 score. He said: “Though not particularly ground-breaking — last year’s Elijah Wood-starring Open Windows pulled the same trick, and much more ambitiously — we’re still going to “like” the result.”
Peter Travers over at Rolling Stone, gave it a 75 score, stating: “What kind of a movie takes place entirely on one screwed-up teen’s computer screen? That would be Unfriended, a creep-you-out experiment in terror that damn near pulls off every trick up its cyber sleeve.”
Joe Morgenstern from the Wall Street Journal, gave it a 70 score, stating: “No, it’s therefore a movie to be seen, if you can endure it — as a shrewd commercial venture, as an online opus that undoes your self-composure and, last and foremost, as a window on a mode of thinking that equates to a state of being.”
Lou Lumenick from the New York Post, gave it a 63. He stated: ” More funny than scary.” Robert Abele from the Los Angeles Times, gave it a 60 score. He said: “As a harangue about cyberbullying, it’s purely exploitative, but when Unfriended zeros in on the whiplash mixture of freedom and torment we get from multitasking our online lives? It’s srsly fun, imo.”
Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, gave it a 60 grade, stating: “It reminds you that today’s horror movies still owe a great debt to Val Lewton, the producer of cheapie classics like “Cat People” (1942) and a virtuoso of shadows who realized that audiences could be entertained if the characters they watched looked like them.
“Unfriended” doesn’t have Lewton’s poetry. Yet the filmmakers understand that one way into an audience’s head and nervous system is to fill the screen with the kind of “insipidly normal characters” (as the critic Manny Farber described Lewton’s) you’re happy to see shiver and scream.”
Peter Debruge over at Variety, gave it a 60 grade, stating: “Simultaneously clever and exasperating, the film puts a novel spin on the genre Roger Ebert dubbed “the Dead Teenager Movie.”
Richard Roeper from the Chicago Sun-Times, gave it a 50 score, saying: “The acting is actually pretty solid. These characters are never in the same room, so the performances amount to a collection of solo scenes. But these kids aren’t likable. Perhaps director Gabriadze and writer Nelson Greaves intended to create a Social Media “Scream” and a commentary on cyber-bullying, but Unfriended comes across as disdainful of millennials.”
Jacob Hall from the New York Daily News, gave it a 40 grade. He stated: ” Unfortunately, the engine underneath that gloss is woefully familiar, offering the same jump scares we’ve seen a thousand times before.”
John Defore over at The Hollywood Reporter, gave it a 30 score, claiming: “In the end one would rather be back at one’s own computer, tending to the tedious details of digital life, than watching this clique get pinged to death.”
Mark Dujsik from RogerEbert.com, gave it a 25 grade, stating: “The movie might just make people associate bullying with a hollow, tedious endeavor that lacks any satisfaction.”
Finally, Michael Ordona from the San Francisco Chronicle, gave it an awful 25 score, claiming: “There’s no one to root for, not even the dead girl. Nothing seems important enough.” Stay tuned. Also, get your favorite Movie stuff, and more by Clicking Here.
