What do you get when you cross a moderately tall woman with a society that asks her about the weather? You get what you deserve — a terrible movie.
Tall Girl 2 left me somewhat confused and mostly enraged.
For a moment, I regretted taking this story, mostly because I wasted two hours of my life on some overly-sanitized, knock-off Hallmark film.
It’s so bad that it’s genuinely difficult for me to write this.
It is hard to know where to start when every single component of a piece of media is so mind-numbingly terrible.
There is no art in cruelty – doing nothing but tearing this movie apart for 500 words will not grant me enough catharsis to get back the two hours I just lost.
The first Tall Girl was undoubtedly a horrible movie. But, much like most Hallmark Christmas rom-coms, it was a fun type of bad. The type of awful movie you can watch with your friends and laugh at or even turn into a drinking game.
It was such a strange concoction of bad ideas, stereotypes, white people complaining about being oppressed and borderline David Lynch-esque surrealist dialogue that you couldn’t help but enjoy.
But Tall Girl 2 commits the cardinal sin of being boring.
A boring movie is worse than any bad film because there’s no fun to be had. Even the one character who made the first movie enjoyable, Harper, the loveable and airheaded agent of chaos, is underutilized. The scenes that feature her try so hard to be serious in tone that they absolutely fail her one good trait.
Another misstep on the movie’s part is how it deals with mental illness.
Throughout Tall Girl 2, the titular tall girl stumbles into the leading role of her high school’s annual play despite the fact that she never acted in her life. As an aside, she does this by explaining to the director that tall people are not actually oppressed, but that she feels like she is because people ask her “how’s the weather up there?”
Keep in mind that the giant lives in New Orleans, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the United States. Her best friend is also a Black woman, yet all she can think about is how hard her life is as a white woman — a TALL white woman. I digress.
After winning the part, the weather woman begins hearing voices telling her that she sucks and isn’t good enough for the part.
The voice is so comical, it reads like a teenager on the internet trying to explain concepts that you’re majoring in back to you. It’s so snarky and cynical that it’s hard not to laugh.
Anyway, the giraffe lady gets over her anxiety because a girl that was mean to her said “oh I get it too” and suddenly everything is fine. Which, as someone who has suffered from mental illness for a good chunk of my life, this not only comes across as tasteless and poorly done, but so unbelievably out of touch with reality that I’m still flabbergasted as I write this.
Who thought this was a good idea? Who decided that Tall Girl needed to be the next Star Wars with a barrage of sequels?
It was bad, no one liked it. What stage of capitalism has led us to consume such abhorrent media?
I give it a 1/10. I want my two hours back.
Also…
SHE’S NOT EVEN THAT FUCKING TALL.
