Movie Review: Drop - 2025

Precursor

So the night was going pretty alright, my girlfriend’s sister was joining us for this showing. We had some homemade overcooked rice and not enough grilled chicken, so the popcorn was hitting that night. Now the trailers had us thinking that this movie was going to flop, but The Woman in the Yard proved us wrong with our assumptions before.

So was it good?

Nah. It wasn’t bad, but good? Definitely not. A bad movie would be something like The Amateur (more on that later). The movie can not be taken seriously, but I don’t believe the director intended for the movie to be anything more than a movie to get drunk to and watch with your date. All that is fine, I love pretty bad dates gone arigh movies, gives my girlfriend and I something to laugh at and insert ourselves in their situation.

An issue with that though is that the movie forces this backstory for the main character to have gone through a very traumatizing abusive relationship. There wasn’t any real development or resolution on it other than she gets with a decent guy. The main character’s trauma was her excuses for half of the weird stuff that she does, and essencially weaponizes her personal issues to garner sympathy. This doesn’t really sit right with me, and makes her trauma feel like it was never really taken seriously, especially considering how over the top the abuse was.

Her partner physically abused her, attempt to force her to shoot himself, threatened to kill their 1 year old child and aimed a loaded gun at him, then shooting himself before the cops could intervene.

I’m sorry HUH? The abuse escalates WAY too hard for not a very good reason. The main plot reason is so that way the character has some criminal history involving the death of a partner, that never saw her convicted of murder by the way, because if she did, that would be more absurd. In fact it’d be better (in my normie opinion) if the partner was still alive but imprisoned so she could either confront this trauma or acknowledge that you can overcome existing trauma for a healthy resolution at the end of the movie, and also give a false villian as we could assume that the partner was behind all this.

Also the antagonist’s plot to kill the date was so overly complicated and terribly excecuted. The villian wiretapped only two areas of the restaurant, sent demands on a 3rd party AirDrop application (that honestly gives out WAY to much of your information to the public, why does everyone who uses it besides the antagonist uses their face and full name, was this app designed for stalker victims?), required a kidnapper with such a level of incompetence as to not TIE UP THEIR UNCONSCIOUS VICTIMS, somehow hope that the date did not have a personal backup of his whistleblower information (which as a professional photographer, is VERY hard to believe he only had 1 physical copy of the proof for FELONY LEVEL EMBEZZELMENT), and require the staff to not notice the main character acting like she’s a paranoid schizophrenic roofy her partner’s drink.

More on the part where the antagonist plan fails unless the date didn’t back up the files, WHY DIDN’T HE JUST SEND THEM TO THE FBI RIGHT AWAY? Was it impossible to go to your local library and email the FBI from there? Or better yet, does he not own a laptop? I’d assume as a photographer, having the ability to inspect and store your files outside of your camera on the go would be really useful, right? I would want my data stored somewhere secure, and not easily stolen. This cracked out lady was able to find the time to go into his bag, steal the SD card in his camera, destroy it, and he never notices? Even a better question, WHY WAS THE SD CARD STILL IN THE CAMERA?

So only 1 of 2 things is possible in this situation then:

1. The date is really naive as to think being an FBI informant does not require any level of survival instincts for his evidence.
2. The antagonist is really… REALLY naive in thinking that someone working directly with THE FBI would be this stupid

So what was good?

Gotta say, the male lead Brandon Sklenar was pretty funny and charming. He brought an sense of ease and rationality to counterbalance the main character’s antics. He’s supposed to be this dreamy hunk that’s so caring and wants something authentic in a person, not the superficial stuff you see on social media, it works fine. I can see he’s not expecting to get laid on the first date, but he does anyways because he’s different from the other guys. Not a deep character, but he’s not supposed to be. He’s supposed to be the character the girls in the audience want to be with, and he plays it well.

The female lead Meghann Fahy had a harder job, because it’s easy to be charming when you’re just a chill guy, but being charming and frantic is pretty counter-intuitive. You don’t want the character to be too frantic or else the girls in the audience don’t want to project themselves to the main character, because remember, this is a bad date gone arigh movie, you want the girls of the audience to think they can swap places with the main character. You can’t have her be too relaxed though, or else the it doesn’t feel like the date has gone arigh, leaving the audience with the feeling this is just a bad movie.

A guilty pleasure of mine during the movie was the inclusion of the millenial coded memes the antagonist was sending for the first half of the movie, I really wished all form of communication was just 2020 memes with the Impact font. It really was stupid in the best way possible. If the movie did that instead of defaulting to the text on screen to show what the antagonist is saying, I would have 0 complaints. All they would need to do is not send duplicate or new memes. Throw us a Panik… Kalm… Panik… next time.

Also the small amount of fight scenes in the movie were pretty entertaining. In the previously mentioned movie, The Ameteur for being in a Jason Borne rogue agent action movie, it was outclassed in exciting fights by a Blumhouse thriller movie. The hand to hand combat was extremely scarce in the Jason Borne rip-off, with only one scene where essentially two special ops agents bear wrestle each other, with the camera constantly cutting and being way to close to the action to tell what is even happening until finally they die.

In this movie though, the kidnapper eventually fights both the (previously mentioned untied) sister, who gets thrown into a wall and a mirror, and the main character, who was thrown across the kitchen island. The director even had a fun shot where the camera tracked the actress sliding across, even when she did a flip falling of, causing a dizzying effect. The main character even stabbed the kidnapper but that behemoth still threw her across a table, man has no concept of pain.

Again, a stupid Blumhouse movie was more exciting than the previously compared $60 million dollar flop of an ad.

Hell, if I remember correctly, there were the same amount of on-screen deaths in Drop than there was in The Ametuer.

In the Ametuer there was:

• The first mercenary lady
• The second mercenary dude
• The special ops agent
• The other hacker girl

In Drop there was:

• The pianist
• The antagonist
• The kidnapper

Alright I was wrong there, but I didn’t go to see bodies drop in Drop, I did for The Ametuer. WHY WAS IT THIS CLOSE?

Matt

You can’t think of this movie after watching it without thinking about Matt… Matt is the waiter for the movie, and he can be either the best or worst part of the movie. Again, no shade to the actor Jeffrey Self, he played the role how the director wanted him to be played.

He is the comic relief character, to break the tension of the scene by basically being that hyper theater kid you know from high school. He is… something. To summerize what he did in the movie is be really bad at being a waiter and a reaction gif for the audience to text their friends in their Instagram groupchat.

Now I’d be lying to say my girlfriend and I weren’t copying his faces everytime he did one on screen, because she said that I make those faces all the time normally, so it stings a little to be labelled as a Matt in her eyes.

Final Thoughts

The movie is stupid, but it doesn’t pretend to be smart. You’re there to be with your partner and go along with the plot. If you’re thinking too much about the plot, you’re enjoying this movie wrong. The characters are not overacting and everyone has some level of chemistry, especially the two leads. It’s not so cringy its bad but still has some cringe in it.

Also the piano rendition of Baby Shark was cute.

• 6/10