Michael Fairbanks
Watching Dempsey Bryk’s Crash Land feels like being trapped at a kickback with obnoxious people who suddenly want to leave the house and do something dangerous. You barely tolerated them before and now all you can do is pray that they’re the only ones who get hurt. It attempts to capture the “charm” of some small town boys who refuse to let adulthood come calling, even when faced with the death of one of their friends. Said passing actually makes them decide to act stupider and even more immature. Sure, grief often makes people regress, but these people are manchildren to their very core. They just become more bold.
We follow aspiring stuntmen Lance (Gabriel LaBelle), Clay (Noah Parker) and Sander (Finn Wolfhard). Their pal Darby (Billy Burke) recently passed away while they were goofing around in the woods. At his funeral, the group makes a scene, playing a reel of their asinine antics in front of Darby’s family because “that’s what he would’ve wanted.” Right. They decide that the only way to pay proper tribute to him is by shooting a short film with all of the biggest stunts they had ever planned. Lance is especially high on this plan, since he is the most outgoing and delusional about his potential career. The group realizes that they need a girl (!!!) to appear in the film as a princess and wind up casting Gemma (Abby Quinn) who does her best to babysit them.
Every single comedy set piece in Crash Land is identical. The boys wander into some populated part of town, start screaming and throwing their bodies around, and then eventually get chased out by the property owners or the cops. They often don’t even really do inventive stunts. They just bother people and occasionally hurt themselves. Their existence is a blight on this peaceful small town and they could not care less. It’s all about them and this god awful movie they’re making for a dead man.
Gabriel LaBelle showed tremendous promise playing young Steven Spielberg in The Fablemans but he might not have the goods to be a movie star. Between Saturday Night and Crash Land, the man cannot pick a good script. He throws himself into Lance’s abhorrent personality with total abandon. He runs around in every scene, hooting and hollering about how nobody in the group cares as much about Darby as him. LaBelle is 23 but Lance is generously at the development level of a fifteen-year-old—just an abysmal presence to be stuck with for even a brief 90 minutes. Meanwhile, Noah Parker is as plain as can be as the group’s most level headed member. Not much to say about Clay other than “he’s nice and shy.” Things with him somehow become even more dull when his romance with Gemma starts. Abby Quinn is atrociously stiff. She seems to be saying her lines in a way that makes her sound more childlike, which is very off putting. Watching Gemma and Clay make awkward eyes at each other is insufferable. Then, there is whatever Finn Wolfhard is doing. Sander somehow has even less going on than Lance and Clay. He’s just the third tier member of the group who wants to direct the movie despite Lance’s insistence that Gemma does it. Wolfhard affects this bizarre voice cadence that at times sounds like he’s trying to do an impression of Andy Serkis’ Gollum. I suppose he thought that we wouldn’t understand that Sander is “the kooky one” if he didn’t.
I just never believed for a moment that these people were even casual friends, let alone a lifelong ride or die group. They seemingly have nothing in common other than acting foolish. Unfortunately, Crash Land does try to pepper in some genuinely emotional beats towards the end when the reality of adulthood finally starts to register to Lance but it is so impossible to sympathize with these people. This might’ve worked for me if the characters were aged down to teenagers or even children but I just have no patience for watching even young adults act like this. There are plenty of loud and immature young men who will surely enjoy Crash Land. It is made by them, for them. There is just something so phony about watching a dynamic like this when it is not an authentic one like Jackass. At least those guys have a job.
