Crush

Crush is one of those newfangled queer teen romance films where the character’s queerness is normalized and wholly accepted. This is a recent sub-genre, but Crush isn’t the first entry in it. Having seen most of the film in said sub-genre, I found Crush to be one of the weaker entries.

Crush follows an artistic teenager named Paige (Rowan Blanchard). Paige is openly a lesbian and has an embarrassingly supportive mom. Paige has a long-time crush on popular girl, Gabrielle (Isabella Ferreira). But it’s Gabrielle’s sister, AJ (Auli’i Cravalho) who Paige ends up spending time with. When Paige is falsely accused of school vandalism, she joins the track team to help her college chances. AJ is assigned to whip the nonathletic Paige into shape.

Crush features a number of queer supporting characters. And thank god, because their lead is a bit of a dud. It takes at least half the movie for Paige to develop a real personality. Up until then, it really feels like being queer is her only character trait. I hate making that argument! Homophobes say it about any given queer person. But in this case it’s almost true. Eventually, she’s awkward enough that Paige officially has two character traits. Well, I guess she’s also pretty mean to everyone. That’s another trait. Paige’s relationship with AJ is mostly predicated on shared awkwardness. They don’t seem to have anything in common. The film asks you to root for them because they’re the lead romantic couple. But it never gave me enough reason as to why I should.

By far the biggest problem is that Crush is trying way too hard. It’s very tagline, “Love is Messy AF” is doing too much to announce its youthful focus. What it instead does is advertise that the writers are themselves not youths. The film works overtime in trying to emulate youth culture and style. But it’s basically guesswork. It also completely robs the film of a chance to have its own style. The try-hard energy is deeply uncool. Uncool is not an ideal adjective for a film about teenagers.

I spent so much of Crush thinking of different, better movies. This film lacks enough original thought that it’s too easy to place it in a larger trend. One of Crush’s main influences has to be Love, Simon. Booksmart was also surely on the inspiration board. Crush also feels like Hulu’s answer to rival Netflix’s The Half of It. Hell, between this and Hearts Beat Loud, married couple Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally both have played open, supportive and somewhat embarrassing hip parents to lesbian only children. Crush is weaker than all these films. My point here is that there are better gay 101 movies for teens. At this point, the genre is getting large enough that you can be a little picky about quality.

Movies like Crush is something I desperately want to see more of. I like what this movie stands for and what it represents. But the actuality of it is pretty disappointing. Little of this movie felt particularly successful. It felt rushed and the comedy was patchy at best. Worst of all, Crush tried far, far too hard to be cool and trendy. And there’s nothing less cool than that.

Overall rating: 5.4/10

Other WLW films in similar genres