Boogie is a 2021 coming-of-age drama about Alfred “Boogie” Chin who dreams of playing basketball in the NBA.
Without a doubt, a directorial debut may truly be an ambitious and difficult task for someone to handle. It actually does require a lot of experience, especially if you want to be a filmmaker. However, it is important to praise these people for wanting to tell a story, take some risks and showcase their cinematic vision on screen. Sadly, a person’s ambition doesn’t always lead to success, which is the case with Focus Features’ latest title Boogie. Written and directed by Eddie Huang, who is best known for Fresh Off the Boat, he decides to take on his feature debut with newcomer Taylor Takahashi in the lead role. It does feel like some sort of passion project for the director, and it’s quite compelling to see a whole premise revolving around an Asian-American’s struggle in life. Unfortunately, it could have been so much better.
As a coming-of-age story, Boogie focuses on our main protagonist Alfred “Boogie” Chin (Takahashi) who dreams of becoming a basketball player in the NBA. However, he feels a ton of pressure from his family who wants him to pursue a scholarship to an elite college. As the movie goes on, he eventually learns to embrace his identity and work hard in order to hopefully achieve his goal. It’s a very interesting narrative that most certainly deserves to be told, but it doesn’t always work, unfortunately.
Boogie is Takahashi’s first screen role, and you can tell he doesn’t know much about acting. His performance is bland and dull, mostly because he’s not that interesting as a character. He would have been a much more fleshed out and intriguing person with a better actor in mind. His relationship with his parents (played by Pamelyn Chee and Perry Yung) is one of the most important elements of the story, but it feels rushed to a point that it start to lose focus. Some of the other supporting actors such as Taylour Paige, Jorge Lendeborg Jr. and Mike Moh try their best even if no one stands out.
Huang’s screenplay also has some issues in terms of dialogue and storytelling. Boogie lacks a cohesive flow to keep the audience interested, because it’s all over the place sometimes. Some of the words that Takahashi says are absolutely cringe-worthy, and it takes you out of it. When it first starts out, it actually does a good job setting up the overall story. Unfortunately, it starts to get less fascinating as it goes on. The basketball sequences, however, are actually really entertaining with some cool camerawork by Brett Jutkiewicz. Since the director is a humongous hip hop fan, the soundtrack is also pretty great, especially one song from the late rapper Pop Smoke.
Boogie is one of those features that sounds like an amazing film when you first hear about the premise, but the execution is just not that good. As a whole, it’s just a messy movie with a boring protagonist and disjointed storytelling. It’s a waste of potential so let’s hope that Huang’s next feature improves.