How ‘Tall Girl’ is short on entertainment value

Netflix’s newest original film, “Tall Girl” was released this past Friday. As its name suggests, the film tells the story of Jodi, an unnaturally tall girl going through the usual trials and tribulations of high school while also dealing with being made fun of for her height. When a handsome foreign exchange student from Sweden starts to catch her attention, however, Jodi decides to give it all she’s got to get together.

“Tall Girl” is a painful ode to irony. Despite the film’s message being to embrace what makes you an individual and to stand out from the crowd, the movie itself feels to have the constant need to fit in with every high school drama to ever exist. While far from a miserable viewing experience, “Tall Girl” leaves so little of an impression after finishing it that it almost becomes frustrating.

A large reason as to why the film feels so bogged down in blandness comes from its screenplay. The writing is very weak, lacking cohesiveness in dialogue sequences that make certain scenes feel almost unfinished. The structure and pacing of events feel to be attempting to pull its audience in one direction to pretend that it wants to try something different, only to fall back in its safety net of cliches that starts becoming old fast. It ends up coming to a point that certain moments straight up make no sense, only existing for the sake of the plot. This, along with the inorganic writing of the characters, leaves the film with a deflated sense of both comedy and drama that ultimately hurts it at the end. With such a premise, the film could have benefited from being far more self aware, but never takes such a risk.

Speaking of which, the characters that populate this film not only suffer from weak writing, but are left with acting that leave much to be desired. Ava Michelle does an overall good job as Jodi, but never elevates her character to be anything more than a discount Cady Heron. The other performances, as a result, don’t fare much better. In particular, Luke Eisner, who stars as the foreign exchange student, does a terrible job, delivering a painfully distracting attempt at a Swedish accent that’s almost laughable.

Production wise, the film isn’t completely incompetent, yet still never fully impresses. The cinematography lacked the kind of character and personality such a premise could have allowed for, instead opting for an unremarkable visual experience that contains some awful compositions at times. The editing never does anything particularly good or bad, but at moments messes with the pacing. The music is absolutely atrocious, going between sickening pop songs and forgettable royalty free sounding music.

Despite all its flaws, “Tall Girl”‘s biggest sin is just being a waste of time. Neither interestingly bad enough to get truly furious at nor being so bad it is entertaining, “Tall Girl” will offer quite literally no entertainment value whatsoever to almost anyone. Nothing will be lost by seeing it, but nothing will be gained either, which may just be an even lengthier issue.