A complete clichéd mess which takes itself far too seriously to be enjoyable in the slightest.

Rating: 3/10 (26 June 2013)

I hadn't heard of The Perks of Being a Wallflower book before this film came out but apparently it's a big hit with people my age (albiet particularly girls). I wasn't interested until it started doing very well with audiences to the point where it entered IMDb's top 250, and is still in a solid position. I wasn't excited but I was intrigued. I was mostly intrigued at the prospect of the author of the original book writing the screenplay and directing the film himself. Can the author of the source material finally do justice and equal the book? Can this be a genuinely original and heartfelt high school movie? The answer is no. Not in Stephen Chbosky's hands anyway. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a self-pitying dead weight inhabited with paper thin characters whose personality is replaced with eccentricity, let alone lack of depth. To be fair, that is what high school feels like, but it's an awful unpleasant feeling I don't want to relive. Its lead character is a cardboard cutout whose interesting moments of change are so left field and bizarre that it's difficult to connect with him at all.
Emma Watson has a terribly inconsistent American accent and lacks any identity beyond a vague irritating Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Ezra Miller does have some welcome enthusiasm, given his restrained performance in We Need To Talk About Kevin, but his character is all over the place. It's a film that deals with a zillion things at once and all of them are clichés in and area I wouldn't be able to relate to even if I was in my equivalent of high school. But the most off- putting part is the horrible lighting and set design. The film might have been okay if it wasn't so poorly lit but that's a stretch. It hits a few interesting notes here and there but it's nothing redeeming and they're swiftly ruined by the next moment approached awkwardly. However, it does have an excellent taste in music and features a lot of my favourites, unfortunately it has no idea how to use them and frustrates me as it cuts before the good part. There's also the big gap in logic of Emma Watson having pretty great taste in music but having no clue what an incredibly famous David Bowie song is. But hey, if this film introduces a generation to this great music, fine. Not my preferred method.
3/10