[yasr_overall_rating]
A guy decides to sell weed after losing his job, but things soon go out of hand as demand of business and paranoia starts taking over.
One of the biggest no-nos in filmmaking, is trying to create a character who is both your central protagonist and antagonist. Of course, there is the exception to the rule when the story focuses on the struggle between man and his inner self, for example, a recovering drug addict, or alcoholic, whose own worst enemy is himself. But in the case of “Baked in Brooklyn,” the story tells you from the very beginning, that one of its central characters, David (Josh Brener), is a pill-popping, neurotic, nervy guy, whose mannerisms and character traits were obviously stolen directly from Jesse Eisenberg. Even his unsurpassable talking speed and nervous tics are bountiful and you just cannot close your eyes for an instant, without envisioning him, another of the movie’s distractions. While Alexandra Daddario (“San Andreas,” “Burying the Ex”) brings much-needed uniformity to Brener’s wacky David, sadly it is not enough to save the film.
At a party one night, Kate (Daddario) catches David (Brener) switching out the DJ’s music play list with his own and they strike up a conversation. They begin hanging out together but she informs him that she is in a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend Simon. When she is offered an unpaid internship at an attorney’s office, she tells David that she will have to move back upstate and commute but when he offers to let her stay with him and his roommates, she gladly accepts, not having to feel guilty as she just broke up with Simon. When David is let go from his office job, he decides to try selling marijuana online and is surprised when it quickly takes off. Using his bike for deliveries, he informs his customers that he is available 24/7 and that is where his relationship with Kate begins to sour. On the road non-stop, they begin to drift apart, with him promising to do better but the allure of more money gets the better of him and he quickly falls back into his routine. Kate moves out after he forgets a planned dinner and when one of his dealers is caught by the police, he suspects David turned him in and he and his friends find him and beat him up. Only then does David realize just how dangerous his job really is and sets out to try and win Kate back.
The movie plays out like the old clichéd love story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl but in this instance, the relationship between David and Kate is totally unbelievable. Kate comes from a wealthy background and although David is nowhere in her league, she falls for him because he is unconventional. Even when he first suggests selling weed, and she tells him that he could get robbed, be arrested, or worse, he insists on going through with it, and she is okay with that. When she moves out, instead of realizing what he has lost, David continues to deliver his drugs, and instead of picking up the phone to talk to her, to apologize, and to try and win her back, he continues to answer his phone from his customers instead. When he is beaten up and robbed one night, that is when his life comes crashing down and only then does he realize what he has truly lost. By then, his perfunctory attempt during the movie’s finale, to cycle upstate to Kate’s parents house so he can try and win her back, feels forced and way past its sell-by date. It is months later and Kate has moved on with her life and so have we. Unlike most romantic movies where the couple breaks up, typically because one of them did or said something bad, separates, followed by the conventional moment of realization of their inability to live without the other person, and then a zany race to the airport/bus station/train station to win back their partner’s affection, here, I couldn’t help but wish that David would fall off his bike, directly underneath a passing truck and do the whole world a favor. He is just so unlikable that he is not worth saving. For a love story to work, it is vital that both people are appealing and engaging in order for the audience to relate to them, in the case of “Baked in Brooklyn,” one out of two ain’t bad.
Available on Blu-ray & DVD Tuesday, November 29th
