Musicals have always been in my personal choices of entertainment and I do not shy away from joining along with a good film as I belt out their great sounds. I also admire watching musicals live preferably in Broadway or in the West End. These shows depend so much on their feel so there are many narrow margin between entertaining and being just “another” musical.
With all good will and best effords, A Week Away crashes straight into that curse hole just mentioned above and gets stuck all the way to give a plain and extremely forgettable show. Moving away from the standard story cliché, this Netflix Original misses the point where it matters the most the score. Before we take that plunge, we should definitely first look some of the plus sides.
The film has some marvelous visuals and terrific dance sequences in this movie. Most of these songs involve huge cast members and the background dancers and supporting cast members are obviously having fun. Still, there’s a certain audience this film is targeting, hoping to attract fans of High School Musical who would leave Zac Efron and follow Kevin Quinn who, intentionally or not, bears a striking resemblance to him.
Kevin plays a rebellious young man called Will Avery. He’s bitter about life ever since he lost his parents and gets into trouble quite often. His recent stunt appears to be his last gamble, after he did steal a police car. But by some twist of events, he is offered an opportunity for redemption in the form of summer camp.
But this is not any ordinary summer camp, this is Camp Aweegaway (A week away? get it?) a Christian camp where it seems Will gradually gets converted and accepts God’s love.
It’s an interesting story but the same cannot be said about the music because this film does not only get the rhythm wrong but gets a weird mix altogether. I understand that most of the time I have to watch these movies which are in some form or the other, dubbed, yet most of the times, it is convincing such that I don’t even think about it. A Week Away does not even pretend how bad it’s been dubbed but at its worst times, it manages to produce some extremely embarrassing outcomes of the practice.
There are a few songs where Will is supposed to feel strong emotions but he is barely moving his mouth throughout the entire song. In the hour one minute two seconds mark, Will is shown sitting at a campfire with his expression saying he has been bored to this point where it’s painful for him to even attempt to move his lips. Quite a few fans of the film would be disappointed by the way his character development occurs here. Such events occur around this one and a half hours long picture’s run time too and are not an off routine occurrence.
I suspect there’s no excuse for this as well, especially because there are many close-up shots of characters’ faces while they are singing. It is very annoying, and sometimes, the timing of the lip movement is a tad too early or too late than the words that are sung. More than once, I thought my Flix was out of sync and then I realized that it is the movie that is out of sync.
Most of the songs here are those feel-good pop songs you would expect, with very nice themes of love, self acceptance and forgiveness. Unfortunately these movies are lost behind a curtain of auto-tuning which almost every song seems to have. The end result is a thick, plastic gloop that quite frankly, needs to be replaced by originality and heartfelt creativity.
Even so, there are those who will take pleasure in this and some people will not mind the bad lip syncing. The themes are definitely good, and the plot is quite straightforward and can be played in the background when one is busy with other activities. But, there is also nothing special here either which makes it a completely unimpressive and soulless letdown.
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