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BANANA SPLIT
Director: Benjamin Kasulke Cast: Hannah Marks, Liana Liberato, Dylan Sprouse, Luke Spencer Roberts, Meagan Kimberly Smith, Haley Ramm, Jessica Hecht, Addison Riecke MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:28 Release Date: 3/27/20 (digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 26, 2020 One wonders if April (Hannah Marks) and Clara (Liana Liberato), the main characters of Banana Split, would have become friends under normal circumstances. They're compatible, for sure, with a shared, wicked sense of humor. The only reason they meet, though, is that Clara starts dating Nick (Dylan Sprouse), who happens to be April's ex-boyfriend and with whom April is still in love. An impressive opening montage shows how April and Nick fall in love and then grow apart as high school comes to an end. April is distraught and then jealous when she learns about Clara. At a party near the start of the summer break before college, Clara introduces herself to April, and after some drinks and dancing, the two become fast friends. They set up some rules to keep things from becoming awkward: no talking about Nick and being honest if one of them starts to feel uncomfortable. The whole of the story, written by Marks and Joey Power, is defined by this underlying conflict. As much as the two young women try to put some distance between their friendship and the reality of Nick's role in their lives, the latter is always the spoken or unspoken bond between these two characters. That's a strange feeling to get from a story that, at least on the surface, is entirely about how such a bond is stronger than a romantic relationship (At least twice, the screenplay goes out of its way to assert that there's nothing romantic happening between April and Clara, and the writers' apparent feeling of necessity to clarify that point might be worth a discussion). To be sure, these two characters are strong personalities, played by Marks and Liberato with charm and an easy chemistry, and whenever the movie actually allows them a few scenes that aren't about Nick, we catch glimpses of a story that could have been. Even so, everything really boils down to Nick—keeping their friendship a secret from him, April pining for him, Clara becoming jealous when her friend sends him a text on his birthday—whether or not the screenwriters and director Benjamin Kasulke realize it. As a result, Banana Split never provides a sense of either character as her own person or both of them as a pair of real friends. It's too caught up in the drama of its gimmicky premise for that. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for
crude sexual content and language throughout, drug and alcohol use - all
involving teens)
