The After Party is like Owen aka O aka Seizure Boy’s manager Jeff. Jeff means well, and wants to do right by his friend. However, in attempting to get us all to like O, Jeff just acts like a colossal douchebag and comes off like a fraud. So we’ve got this irritating, smarmy jerk telling us his buddy is great, so when we finally get to see him and he throws up in Wiz Khalifa’s face, we really just want to punch Jeff in the face. I don’t know what The After Party version of that is, but it can’t be good for your laptop.
Owen’s (Kyle) been trying for a year now to get his rapping talents discovered by anyone. His manager/best friend Jeff (Harrison Holzer) stalks around various New York record labels to try to get Owen discovered. Discovery gets a huge setback with the Wiz Khalifa incident, which turns Owen into a meme and gets him a new name: Seizure Boy. Defeated and with no other options, Owen decides to enlist in the military. Jeff sets up one last chance for Owen to get his real talents signed…at an underground French Montana concert in the VIP area. Owen just sees this as his last great night in New York, and maybe one last chance to hook up with Jeff’s hot older sister, Alicia (Shelley Hennig).
The After Party suffers from a problem where it THINKS scenarios are funny, but they lack any killer punch lines or payoffs. Let’s start with small things: trying to get into an after after party, the boys get denied at the door, saying they can only get in if they find some beautiful women. An even passable comedy would have a well constructed montage of several attempts to get into this party will a host of crazy, super young, cosplaying, dominatrixy, women, that gets progressively weirder and funnier. This movie has one scene with a girl with braces, but the braces reveal happens immediately, so there’s no laugh out loud moment. Ok, so the small stuff doesn’t work, no biggie. However, most of the main story drivers of The After Party also have no payoff. Owen REALLY has it bad for Alicia, and they keep running into each other at various after after after parties, setting up a scenario where they watch the sunrise with 40s and some salt and vinegar chips. A well written comedy would at least get us to this scenario in some way: Alicia sounds like she wants to do it, or at least Owen could be there with someone else. However, NEAR sunrise, Alicia simply decides she wants to be driven home. Boo urns! One of the movie’s other big thrusts is that Owen can’t really be discovered because of his Seizure Boy failings and hit to his confidence. The After Party should have had him earn his confidence by leaning into how internet infamy like that can help him get into parties and actually meet more people, but instead the movie just kinda forgets the Seizure Boy stuff and just….drifts away: Owen really doesn’t get confidence: he just diss tracks Jeff. At this point I was getting pretty irritated with The After Party, the only hope being they’ve teased Owen meeting this producer Rahmel the entire movie, and I was hoping for a killer cameo in a movie that has MANY famous artists and producers. But no, even that payoff is only mildly funny.
So when a movie like this is so unfunny. The plot holes really start to stick out. I’m convinced the movie doesn’t know how old its two leads are. There are signs these boys are about to graduate high school, or have just graduated high school: there are references to Jeff not being liked in high school and going to Harvard in the fall, and that Jeff got his driver’s license last year. However, Jeff’s dad says Harvard LAW school, making me wonder ok, so like graduate school? These boys have been trying to get discovered for a year too, meaning they have been out of school for some undisclosed amount of time, so they should be 19? 20? Which brings us to Owen and Jeff’s crazy night together. New York must have the laxest bouncers outside of a college bar, because these boys simply walk into multiple after parties at various bars, underground hip hop clubs, and strip clubs. At this club Owen sees a stripper and hears hip hop music, but Jeff, who ALSO loves hip hop music, but is white, hears Bette Davis Eyes, when the movie has repeatedly shown they don’t understand old references. The After Party is going to give some horny 18 year old boy a dream to try to go to a strip club thinking that the bouncers will not card him, only for him to get roughed up and make up lies to his friends about what it was like there.
As you can see, The After Party fails on almost every level, but will make a perfect half-watch movie for Netflix. Kudos to Netflix continuing their drive to tell different stories. Maybe next time though, don’t buy a pitch that involves a terrible story with many hip hop artist/producer cameos, because that movie will be a rip off, like the Chip O Lee’s burrito place Owen’s dad owns.