The 10 year reunion of a group of friends from High School is the setting of this one night story with an ensemble cast of Channing Tatum, Justin Long, Kate Mara, Chris Pratt, Rosario Dawson, Max Minghella, and many others. This plot line resumes well the movie that in fact shows different vignettes of the young adults having not really evolved since their high school years. The plot has many problems and one major is the fact that the characters have each their past in High School and we seem to never really get involved in their gang or to be able to get the big piucture. The failure of the director Jamie Linden is to not make us feel we are in the gang. Being the same age of these adults I was expecting to easily connect with the different characters but I feel that they are from a High School that is only possible in films and that the group of friends is so stereotyped that compared to a near-masterpiece like Dazed and Confused, 10 Years is a very poor film.
It is also sad to see that some scenes are taking forever to end when it is almost clear that they involved improvisation and/or poor writing. It is very difficult to get Linden’s point through the whole mess that the different stories without real background lead us to.
However, it is clearly an attempt, even if it is a poor one, to make an Indy film that tries to capture a generation and a group of people that, if it was written with greater means, an interesting social study. We feel that Linden got some interesting plot lines and ideas but a rewritten script and a tighter editing would have help its first effort a lot. This is not a total waste but it must be seen as a young director’s first piece to make his teeths and get stronger behind the pencil and behind the camera, even if the Nouvelle Vague guys used to say that the camera was the pencil, a strong script is a solid base to a strong film. Approach with caution.
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