In no governance, social contract, business dealing, association, casual understanding, or agreement should this damn movie have been 2 hrs 15 minutes long. That’s just cruelly indulgent and frustrating and oh my god make it stop! Not since the good ol’ days of being trapped in a movie theater by Cats have I wanted to walk out as much.

Dear Evan Hansen is based on a Tony Award winning play that I haven’t seen but I have to believe something got lost in translation. Not sure how this morally abhorrent story could have worked on stage when it fails so utterly at the movies.

The film is about a teen boy with badly-acted tics who gets into a tussle with another kid in high school. When that kid commits suicide while in possession of a letter Hansen wrote to himself, everyone is suddenly under the impression they were best friend. And Hansen goes along with it… lying and making up stories about the dead kid.

So we start off on the wrong foot with this unlikable character and then the unconvincing awkward performance just makes it worse. I get that the actor played the character on stage… but his performance on screen is just nothing but slouching and fake mannerisms. Maybe he was trying too hard or maybe the performance is the same as the one on stage where the audience is much further away. I don’t know.

Regardless, the character does immoral and reprehensible things and we, the audience, have to just tick off the minutes until his come-uppance. We know this house of cards is coming down and he’ll have to apologize to everyone… or whatever. And the movie is so stuck in its own bad habits to make us wait forever for the inevitable. And then, what? we’re suppose to like him again? Maybe? No.

We also get a lot of murky messages about mental illness and the use of social media (it’s good! It’s bad! We’re done talking about it!). And the school is full of kids who react to a suicide in a way that needs Christian Slater and Winona Ryder to roll up with some Ich Lüge bullets. Did they intentionally make the high school full of fakers and liars or was that something they missed in the edit?

And it doesn’t help the songs… are these the Broadway songs? Since they all sound alike and have no elevation or life. That’s partly because this musical doesn’t commit to its genre… when a character sings, only that character is in the musical. Everyone else goes along like its the real world and that’s even while talking to the singer (one assumes the singer is actually speaking… but it’s hard to tell what their logic was).

So, yeah, this is overlong film about a thoroughly unlikable person who never gets less unlikable. It’s a bad musical that doesn’t exist in the heightened world of musicals. It’s got a morally reprehensible plot. And one assumes (or hopes) it has gutted the original stage play. This was a misfire in so, so many ways… and it had the bad grace to refuse to give us a The End. Two+ hours is much to much for this turkey.

Score: 61