Director Jake Schreier
Staring Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, Austin Abrams
Rated M
Score 3/6

A young man and his friends embark upon the road trip of their lives to find the missing girl next door.

If 33 is too old for teen movies, somebody please send me the memo.
Now that attempted joke is out of the way, time to get down to business. Paper Towns is the second movie that I have watched that was adapted from a 2008 novel of the same name written by John Green. Even though I haven’t read any of Green’s novels it should be noted that there are significantly less dying teens then the previous movie adapted from a Green and it seems that the talent pool of twenty-something actors has grown since last year because Cinemasins seemed to be of the opinion that last year the talent pool of twenty-somethings wanting to act in a mainstream movie was on the small side in 2014.

There has been a lot of talk comparing Paper Towns to John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. Considering the iconic status of The Breakfast Club probably every single teen-movie and novel for the next forty years is going to pay homage to it in way or another until a creatively bankrupt studio head decides that it’s a good idea to remake it, and to be honest with a mysterious girl next door causing a young man to truly live for the first time there is more of a comparison to be made with Luke Greenfield’s The Girl Next Door from 2004 then with Hughes’ classic. It might be great for a movie to be the ‘next …..’ for ‘Generation ….’ But if Jake Schreier (who has directed a grand total of two feature-length movies) is going to be a director worth a dam, then maybe, just maybe we should let Paper Towns be the next Paper Towns. Though it should be noted that, The Breakfast Club is the second movie that Hughes has directed.
Paper Towns is a watchable movie and Cara Delevingne gave a decent performance but I would say that Austin Abrams gave the standout performance, because I’m still debating with myself if the character of Margo was worth going on the road trip for. But considering the intelligence of teenage boys when it comes to teenage girls the road trip was inevitable.