All Critics (175)
|
Top Critics (34)
|
Fresh (120)
|
Rotten (57)
|
DVD (8)
The Runaways is cool, but the Runaways were just so much cooler.
Aside from following the clichéd (if real) storyline, The Runaways is plagued by something of a split personality, thanks to its two young stars.
Excess is abundant in photographer and music-video director Floria Sigismondi's energetic debut.
There's a flinty integrity in this movie's look at the rock grind, and Stewart and Fanning are intensely watchable.
While Jett and Currie emerge as blurry, half-formed characters, Shannon's Fowley brings the contradictions the Runaways embodied into sharp, biting focus.
Jett, Currie, and the others are teen outcasts in Me Generation Los Angeles, aching to break out of their lives. You can feel their frustration, their need to make an unholy racket.
... A typical story of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, but it's told with style and energy that keep it from bogging down amid the clichés.
[It chooses] to merely nod at the more complicated, strange and exciting aspects of the band's story and spend most of its time touching on the usual stuff
In age-appropriate casting, Fanning doesn't put a platform boot wrong in her portrayal of a valley girl rock chick (circa. 1975) growing up way too fast, with neither the inclination nor the wherewithal to slow down.
The film might be intended as a cautionary tale, but that tends to get lost amid the lurid thrills and tacked-on happy ending.
Aside from Stewart transforming herself into Jett, once the band is formed, there is little about the film that captures the atmosphere of the time period.
Director Floria Sigismondi brings the tale of this real-life pop-punk band to the screen with the traits of a vapid, glossy promo video. And it works! A shame about the length then.
It's not so much a shock to the system as a series of practised strokes, yet -- for moments at a time -- it makes you squirm happily in your seat.
It's miles too long and doesn't know when to shut up, but The Runaways is too much fun to really do any damage to the world.
Sigismondi's dramatised account of the band has echoes of Almost Famous as it captures a tangy flavour of the hunger for fame and the bittersweet reality of success in the Seventies rock scene.
The Runaways se mora preporučiti, iako prije svega svima onima koji su prije toga bili prisiljeni gledati Sumrak, odnosno iz terapeutskih razloga.
For the most part it works, thanks to painstaking recreations of hazy disco-era dive bars, faded roller rinks and seedy motels, plus a ballsy performance by Kristen Stewart.
Given that the band were more about attitude than music, there's not a lot of substance here.
Fanning captures Currie's surly "Cherry Bomb" style effectively, particularly when dolled up in the notorious white basque that Currie is remembered for; Stewart is even better as the furiously smouldering Jett.
There's a wham, bam, thank you, man, quality to this music biopic that makes it a pleasurable rock rush that's easy on the eye, even if it fails to do much more than skate the surface of the band of its title.
Maybe The Runaways is Linson's way of showing that he can make a success of this subject, and I think he has done, with a film which shows how brutal and sexist rock'n'roll is.
As far as music biopics go this is conventional fare, while the songs - like the fashions - haven't aged well. But with both women giving their all, you can't fault the enthusiasm.
Exuberant and aggressive but also questionable and ambivalent.
Hazy both as a portrait of teenage excess (a lot of pouting, kissing, and kicking of dustbins) and as an account of The Runaways' fame in the second half of the 1970s (they appear to have been big in Japan).
More Critic Reviews
Top Critic
