Diamond in the Rough (2022)

This movie was actually so bad it was laughable. Most of the comedy came from the fact that it was so cringey that I giggled to myself to make myself feel less uncomfortable. It was a little bit like watching High School Musical 2 but every so often there was an f-bomb dropped or a scene where a young girl is essentially sexually preyed upon by gross old men and then I was abruptly reminded that I was indeed watching an R-rated film. Griffin Johnson should never act again. I think a sack of potatoes could have performed better than he did. This was truly the biggest mess of a story structure I’ve ever seen in current film. The protagonist played by Boscarino is truly the antithesis of a strong, likable female protagonist. Not all female protagonists need to be likable as evidenced by the brilliant filmmaking in Hulu’s recent “Not Okay” (Quinn Shephard, 2022); however, this took unlikable female protagonist to a new level. On that note, in all honesty all of the characters were incredibly unlikable and unrelatable. All the general disturbances of this film aside, from a purely structural standpoint it’s shocking this script made it past the development stage. The comedy doesn’t land, the plot is generally ridiculous and has no grounding in reality, and the characters are incredibly static and overall just slightly irritating. It’s objectively a bad script. Don’t waste your money or valuable time on this. Disney Channel could have taken this concept and made it 100x better.