#UNICORN HTTPS REVIEW MOVIE#
It’s a generically boring gig, and yet, watching her suffer through it - she sarcastically tells her parents, “Old Kit didn’t try hard enough to like things that are disgusting” - it’s hard not to interpret this movie as being openly hostile to the 99% of audiences who do something other than paint rainbows for a living. That detail, like nearly all of Larson’s artistic choices, isn’t half as cute as she seems to think.īack home with her camp-counselor parents (Bradley Whitford and Joan Cusack, who talks to everyone as if he or she were four years old), Kit tries to get a grown-up job, working as a temp in an advertising firm. But now that she’s entering the adult world, is the movie rewarding her for having held on to her childish sensibility, or is it suggesting that she really needs to grow up?įrankly, it’s hard to decipher the movie’s agenda: When Kit’s art-school professors flunk her for painting yet another unicorn as her final project, are they the ones who need to think outside of their fuddy-duddy ways, or is it meant as a loud-and-clear early warning that Kit is blocked and needs to move past her fixation with magical lone-horned horses? One thing is clear: Kit should really learn to paint without making such a rainbow-colored mess on her own face. Her character loves glue guns, glitter and improvised crafts, and the movie ought to feel as charming and eccentric as Kit’s own artwork, playfully introduced in home videos that convincingly suggest that Larson herself grew up putting all her energy into watching “Rainbow Brite” and doodling unicorns. Who wouldn’t want to watch Larson get the spirit animal she’s always wanted? It’s just that there’s a serious mismatch between the personality of Samantha McIntyre’s script (which seems to be written as a kooky, do-it-yourself comedy, à la “Being John Malkovich” or “Napoleon Dynamite”) and Larson’s directing style, which feels entirely incompatible with whimsy. “Unicorn Store” spends so much time focused on Kit’s mostly-average, mostly-boring pre-unicorn life that it’s hard to understand what the universe (or the movie, at least) is trying to teach her - something about not being selfish, or the importance of not throwing bratty tantrums in your 20s, or (and this is a direct quotation, albeit one whose meaning is muddled) “we’re all looking for happiness and maybe if we’re lucky we can just buy it in a store.”Ī child actress who broke out with the 2013 indie “Short Term 12,” Larson is an immensely loveable star who, two years later in the movie “Room,” demonstrated how effortlessly she manages to bridge the empathy gap between tricky characters and skeptical audiences. What if Kit’s childhood wish came true? Would it be the best thing that ever happened? Or in some cases, is giving a girl a pony the worst possible present? Perhaps there’s some wisdom to that, but wouldn’t it be great to find out? Jackson, wearing tablecloth-print suits and tinsel in his afro, à la Beyoncé), where Kit can arrange to adopt her very own unicorn. In order for this pixie-dusted contemporary fable to make its point, the movie erects a magical pop-up shop just for Kit, complete with world’s most flamboyant salesman (Samuel L. Mostly, it’s about a unicorn-obsessed young art student named Kit (Larson) who needs some sort of life lesson (although what it was exactly remains maddeningly unclear at the end). Yes, it’s about unicorns, but only obliquely. It’s a colossal oversight on Hollywood’s part: For all the girls (and boys) who grew up dreaming about those fabled beasts, there exists a unicorn-shaped hole in the cinematic universe today, and it’s long been my belief that the first filmmaker to come along and fill it was going to become very, very rich.īrie Larson’s “Unicorn Store” is not that movie.
Recent years have seen blockbusters made about pirates and wizards and zombies and superheroes, but you have to go all the way back to Ridley Scott’s “Legend” (1985), or else Rankin/Bass’ animated “The Last Unicorn” (1982), to find a proper movie made about unicorns.