I doubt anyone but Croatians are familiar with Croatian cinema, but almost nothing in it is like this film. That being said the actual film itself lacks a lot of minimum requirements to make it an above average movie but one cannot hold that against a young talent with barely any money in a country that cares about movies as much as Stalin cared about starvation.
The main problems that hold this movie back are the characters, sound and acting. I'll only repeat this one last time, but all of these problems are justified due to the budget. Since the movie is plot based, like a Guy Ritchie film, the characters are there to serve the plot rather than vice versa. I felt that this held the movie back from being anything other than average due to the fact that the story is an everyday pothead/student story. There was nothing truly exciting in the plot, and the plot itself was more of a gimmick than an actual story. A few stories that start the same, separate then reconnect. It wasn't written that interestingly and there wasn't a truly shocking or exciting event that happened throughout the entire plot. The fact that the climax and ending, which was the party that the movie revolves around, was very anti climactic and didn't have a real payoff, similar to the characters in the movie, which are almost non existent. All of them kind of speak in the same intonation, none of the actors emote further than any amateur actor would and none of the characters go through any change throughout the movie, and we all know audiences like characters more than the things characters do. There were two friends that the plot was following that had really bad chemistry and weren't portrayed very well, kind of stuck out like a sore thumb. Movies like these deserve better written characters. Something else that sticks out like a sore thumb would be the "homages" to directors that this films director obviously loves dearly. Guy Ritchie and Edgar Wright were the ones that were front and center. Quick swipe cuts, character bio's on screen, editing tricks and so on. None of them were new or inventive, just something that literally anyone who has seen an Edgar Wright movie more than once would pick up on. Of course the editors cannot be faulted for this, most student films are made by copying their idol's style so this is perfectly understandable. The editing worked some times but some of the jokes repeated themselves too much and lost their humor, others just were too gimmicky, as if the director just made the editor put that transition there just to show that he could be like Edgar.
All of this being said I want to point out how astonishingly better the movie is than it deserves to be. Despite its very obvious flaws this movie is probably the most interesting film (indie or not) to be shown to young Croatian audiences. The director deserves a bigger budget and crew and maybe a better writing team and he's on his way to Hollywood. If I was giving this movie a score based on how good it should have been than it would be a solid 8, but looking at it just as a film it is definitely barely average.
I just wish that the director (who is obviously competent) gets the budget he deserves
5/10
