Main cast: Joe Keery (Kurt Kunkle), Sasheer Zamata (Jessie Adams), Mischa Barton (London Sachs), Frankie Grande (Richard Venti), Lala Kent (Kendra Sheraton), Josh Ovalle (Bobby BaseCamp), Sunny Kim (DJ uNo), John DeLuca (Mario Papazian), Linas Phillips (Frederick Pengler), Jessalyn Gilsig (Andrea Archer), Sean Avery (Officer Hall), Kyle Mooney (Miles Manderville), and David Arquette (Kris Kunkle)
Director: Eugene Kotlyarenko
Spree is what one would get when they slap the label “satire” onto a film to hide the fact that it is a boring, draggy, dreary thing indeed.
Most of the names, big and small, on the credits boil down to one- or two-scene cameos, so the three people out there hoping to see Frankie Grande shine like a diamond will be very disappointed, I’m afraid. The bulk of the screen time goes to Joe Keery, who isn’t bad at all, but his performance is crippled by a script that labors under the delusion that it is far funnier than it actually is.
Mr Keery is Kurt Kunkle, who for the last 10 years have tried every social media bandwagon there is, only to gain at most low double-digit views on a good day. His father is a DJ, his mother had long wisely fled for saner pastures, and Kurt drives for the ride-share service Spree to make ends meet. Well, that and babysitting Bobby, a far, far more successful streamer that resents Kurt for trying to hitch his sorry-dud ass on Bobby’s fame.
Well, eventually Kurt has a bright idea. He will give the people that have the misfortune to get into his vehicle poisoned water, and everything will be streamed live on Kurt’s World, so don’t forget to ride and subscribe!
The problem with movies of this kind is that social media moves fast, and while this one comes out in 2020, it is satirizing a state of social media that is at least five years out of date.
For example, the days of doing dumb things to get views and engagement are behind; these days it’s far easier and effective to buy an established account, probably hacked or stolen but who cares, and use the followers or subscribers that come with the account to start with a bang.
This movie portrays all the “bad guys” that, I suppose, deserve to die as people with talking points that are considered “alt-right” today, but these so-called “alt-right” people have been driven off main social media platforms again in the last five years at least. Therefore, this movie is “satirizing” something that is barely relevant, as the only “alt-right” people on the mainstream social media platforms these days are actually centrists or neocons. These people are considered Nazis just because they don’t repeat the left-wing echo chamber that is mainstream social media these days.
At least this movie doesn’t try to pass off 4chan as a hacker, I suppose.
Hence, as a satire, this thing feels like the brainchild of someone that hasn’t actually used social media since the early 2000s, before the World Wide Web becomes one giant corporate conglomerate controlled by monopolies owned by idiot man-children in bed with their favorite DNC politicians. It just doesn’t work.
Then, there is the matter of Kurt. What is he supposed to be a satire of? The guy is a pathetic idiot, through and through, and if anything, he’s a perfect representation of the average social media user these days. Is it really satire when there is nothing satirical about it?
Is this movie trying to satirize the obsession of influencers with their engagement numbers? Sure, Jessie Adams talks a lot about not wanting fame—which is easy to say when she’s a famous social media person—and how people lose all sense of boundaries and even morals when they spend too much time online, but in the end, she’s still online, everyone’s still online, and Kurt becomes super famous.
The problem here is that the movie is dead earnest about using Jessie Adams as a mouthpiece for its intended messages, only to later just demonstrate that it is just virtue signaling like Jessie and the bulk of the social media users these days. It doesn’t satirize the virtue signaling, it just reinforces that notion, and that’s just incompetent if you ask me.
Oh, and none of the jokes land, and the movie just drags on and on like it is an episode of Kurt’s World.
Wait, maybe that’s the whole point? Is it satirizing the vapidity and stupidity of present day social media by being vapid and stupid? I can certainly tell how vapid and stupid it is, but I’m not sure if that should count for or against this painful waste of time.
