Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing ★★★½

I'm kind of surprised by how much I enjoyed this. To be fair, I was expecting to not like it at all, so anything above that would have been a net gain. I actually found myself enjoying the characters and being eager to see the story unfold. However, the story unfolding would prove to be the movies biggest drawback. You could have shaved off at least 30 minutes off of this. It introduces us to the main plotline right from the get-go and then spends 75% of the movie reiterating the same thing over and over via flashbacks and backstory. I didn't mind it for a while, but so much of the movie is spent on aspects that didn't contribute to the overarching story at play and they just dragged and dragged. Luckily, the acting is solid so none of the scenes were difficult to watch, but there were points in the movie where I just wanted things to hurry up so I could see the resolution.

That brings me to my next complaint; the ending. After slowly crawling through the details, it rushes through the climax and resolution like it has somewhere else to be. I liked the ending itself, but the last 5 minutes of the movie felt very out of place and even awkward. It was as if they forgot how the rest of the movie was paced and just slapped on the ending to make up for it.

All in all, I had a good time for what it's worth. My rating will probably go down over time once it sinks in, but Daisy Edgar-Jones stood out to me and I guess I was in the mood for a story like this.

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