Honey Boy (2019)
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Honey Boy Movie Review
Honey Boy is a 2019 drama film directed by Alma Har’el and starring Shia LaBeouf. It’s an okay, but far from great effort.
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“Make me look good, Honey Boy“
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Written by Shia LaBeouf himself, this film chronicles his own growing up, and especially it focuses on his relationship with his father whom Shia chose to play. Yes, everything here reeks of a vanity project, which it certainly is in a way, but it obviously served as a type of therapy for the actor who wrote the screenplay during his days in rehab.
The main problem with this movie its cheap look and direction. Every problem here obviously stems from Alma Har’el’s directing. Being her first ever feature, she did not really know how to direct it properly and there are many poor choices here, in particular the scene transitions, the overloud score at times and the overall movie looks somewhat cheap and unambitious.
But that led to more and better focus on the two main characters, and that was ultimately a good thing. I found the movie working best when dealing with the two, especially their various arguments and discussions. The father-son dynamic is strong, complex and damaged, and it obviously seemed personal.
I just wish that he portrayed himself in a more nuanced manner as he obviously showed his character overly positively with the dad being the antagonist in a way. But the performance from the kid is pretty strong, and Shia himself is great as the father, very believable throughout.
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I also found Lucas Hedges’ performance reliably strong as Shia in later years in rehab. Everybody here did a good job, but the overall jumping from past to present wasn’t as smoothly realized as I would have hoped. The dialogue is good, some of the scenes are emotional, but at the end of the day the movie did not do anything meaningful or particularly sophisticated with this subject matter, and it was maybe too personal and thinly surfaced. It needed more edge as this way it was just depressing and cold.
Honey Boy is certainly very well acted with Lucas Hedges and Shia LaBeouf both delivering quite strong work, but the movie is a bit of a vanity project for Shia as it’s overly personal, and not ambitious or sophisticated enough in its plot. The father-son scenes are great, but the direction is weak and the film isn’t particularly well made as a whole.
