Film Review: Like Crazy

Posted in Film, Reviews
By Sam Bathe on 27 Jan 2012

Falling for native Jacob (Yelchin) while in LA to study, Anna (Jones) knows she’s pushing her luck by overstaying her student visa but in a moment of passion turns her back on the airport for an extra couple of weeks with her darling before a summer back in England.

What is portrayed as a crazy, unpredictable plot is quite the opposite, telegraphed the moment Anna chooses to miss her flight. The second she decided to stay in LA despite her visa, you knew it was downhill from there, for Anna and Jacob and the film in general.

The film fails to explore each’s new partners, and while leaving the focus on the central relationship isn’t always a bad thing, when main duo fail to captivate in their own right, it feels a misstep not to have expanded the narrative.

Like Crazy’s success largely depends on you rooting for the central characters from the very beginning, but I unfortunately, did not. I didn’t feel any sympathy for the difficulties of their long distance relationship after such stupidity at the start of the film.

It’s not all bad though and the film’s entirely improved dialogue feels wonderfully naturalistic and real. The plot was mapped out in advance, based loosely on one of director Drake Doremus’s earlier relationships, immigration problems et al, but the actual dialogue was either made up on the spot, on the day of filming or borrowed from a run-through some two weeks prior to shooting. And the shoot, it should be noted too, was wrapped on a $250,000 budget and the consumer Canon EOS 7D DSLR camera.

Anton Yelchin turns in another uninspiring performance, although opposite, Felicity Jones proves again that she’s going to be a big star in the future and here is something of a revelation.

Like Crazy is a younger generation’s more indie version of One Day. It suffers from a lot of problems, but in the end the positives just about come out on top. In Felicity Jones, Doremus struck the gold mine an d unsurprisingly has tapped her again for his next film, if only frustrations that lead right back to the start of the film had been ironed out and the sky would have been the limit.

2/5

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