The Birthday Cake

Fans of mafia movies will like Birthday Cake. It's a simple story, and it doesn't take long for you get invested in the main character, Gio. The cast is stacked with a bunch of talent, And I had a good time watching it.

The editing is a bit sketchy and the sound quality is atrocious. I had a hard time understanding the dialogue so I had to turn on the subtitles.

I mainly wanted to leave a review to score it fairly for those with an open mind. It's much better than a 3 or 4 out of 10 like IMDb has it scored. The talented cast alone makes it worth watching. Check it out.

Gio (Shiloh Fernandez) is bringing a birthday cake to a gathering of his family of criminals. His mother had made the cake special. His father died 10 years ago and the cake is dedicated to his late father's birthday.

I like the turn. It's a big swing. I appreciate big swings even if it ends in a foul ball. That's what we have here. The swing is hard and the effort is there. In the end, it's a close miss. With such a big turn, the movie needs to set it up better. Quite frankly, I had to rewatch the first part. First of all, the father is not set up at all. The audience may require some father son time. Second, Gio actually has little to do with the cake. It would be more compelling if he's the one who specialized the cake. It's more retroactively compelling. There are a lot of big acting talents here but they are not filling out the screen. The style is deliberate indie and those star power is somehow diminished. This is a near miss but sometimes, those can be interesting.

Lots of great stars, playing characters that are not fleshed out at all, and super amateur feel to whole thing. $6.99 was wayyyyy too much to waste on this. If you're curious, wait til it's .99 or free- then it won't hurt as much when it's over.

A waste of a good cast. I'd love to see a breakdown of the economics behind this (i.e. How much it took for reputable actors to attach their names to this project).

I decided to watch this movie because Penn Badgley. The movie was about a boy name Gio attending a celebration for his fathers 10th death anniversary at Mob boss Angelo house and he was responsible for bringing the yearly traditional cake his mother makes. On the other hand, his cousin Leo had everyone in the neighborhood looking for him because he got caught by the feds transporting drugs and world on the streets he was a rat. In my opinion, we needed more of a back story to why Gio's father was killed and what was the purpose behind Sophia killing the mob family ..