Drop is a flop

I wasn’t going to review Drop. It was Sunday night, the end of the school term. “I’ll only review it if it’s amazing or if it’s so crap I have to get it out of my system,” I said to my gorgeous date (my Dad). But here I am, reviewing something that is so incredibly mediocre that when I messaged my editor asking him if he wanted me to review it, I called the movie Trap, which is an M. Night Shyamalan film I haven’t even seen but which somehow left more of an impression on me than Drop.

I thought Drop had potential. It’s helmed by director Christopher Landon, who directed the decent Happy Death Day and the excellent Freaky. I guess I should have remembered he also directed the tragically shit Happy Death Day 2U, a sequel so unnecessary and badly constructed that I was praying the film would end with my death day, which, given the circumstances, would have been happy indeed.

It’s also co-written by Jillian Jacobs (from one of my all-time favourite shows, Community). Hang on. No, it’s not. I just looked her up, and her name is spelled Gillian. Goddamn it. This Jillian is responsible for writing Truth Or Dare which is another mediocre ballsack of a movie from Blumhouse. So maybe it never had potential.

Drop does have an interesting enough premise. A lady (whose name I don’t remember or care to) is going on her first date since leaving her abusive ex-partner, a man she has been talking to for months but only just now meeting. During their dinner, she starts receiving ominous “drops” or “airdrops” to her phone. Airdrop is an iPhone application which allows you to send unsolicited images to anyone in your vicinity, and much like receiving a U2 album on your iPod, it’s generally unwanted and unsavory.

In this case, it’s slightly threatening messages with familiar meme images that tell our leading lady that she must complete a series of tasks in order for her son to survive the night. It’s an intriguing enough premise, and I do enjoy the fact that it dares to spend the majority of its runtime in a single location, which means it has to rely completely on strongly written dialogue, which it just doesn’t have.

To be fair, some of the dialogue is genuinely funny. In fact, if this movie had just turned into an awkward first date movie, it might have actually been okay. There are some genuine laughs to be had between the dining couple and their waiter (a struggling improv actor who is waiting tables hoping his career will take off eventually – which turns out to be the most believable plot point in the film) but these jokes don’t really provide anything in terms of story development or add thematically to the concept, they are just a welcome release from the rest of the meandering story.

And by meandering, I mean meandering. It takes SO long setting up its premise that it doesn’t leave any time for twists and turns or unexpected takes on the genre. By the time the story finally got going, I found myself so uninvested that I wished I had been watching the waiter’s improv show.

Overall, this film is just complete and utter mediocrity. It takes a unique and genuinely cool concept, drags it out with a narrative steamroller and then leaves you so uninvested that you kinda wish you had just stayed home and watched Community. Which is never the wrong decision.

+ Drop screens in NZ at Hoyts from Thursday 17 April.