Judd Apatow’s new film, The King of Staten Island, premiered today On-Demand with Pete Davidson leading a cast that also includes Marisa Tomei, Bill Burr, and Steve Buscemi. Davidson, who also co-wrote the movie with Apatow and Dave Sirus, stars as 24-year-old deadbeat Scott Carlin, who has dealt with depression, among other issues, since his father (who was a firefighter) died in a fire when Scott was a child. This movie is also semi-autobiographical and is loosely based on Pete Davidson’s experiences, having grown up on Staten Island and losing his real dad, Scott, on 9/11 . If you’re familiar with any of Davidson’s comedy or appearances over the years, you’d know he talks pretty openly about his father’s death, which much like in the movie, involves a dark sense of humor as his way to cope. It’s also interesting that as much as Davidson has shit on Staten Island in the past, it’s clear after watching this movie that he appreciates the lessons he learned by being from there. It’s where he grew up, where his family is from, it’ll always be apart of him, and this movie was, in a strange way, a love letter to his hometown.
From the get-go, it’s obvious that Scott is a total piece of shit. He pretty much just smokes weed and hangs out at his friend’s house all day, which sounds cool until you realize none of them seem to have jobs. I’m not a parent, but if I were, there’s no way in hell I’d let my 24-year-old son do nothing all day and live rent-free. So as much as Scott is to blame for his lack of ambition, his mom, Margie (Marisa Tomei) is equally responsible.
Scott makes two exceptionally bad choices over the course of the movie. The first is when he thinks it’s a great idea to give a random 9 year old boy a tattoo. Let me set the scene. Scott, an aspiring tattoo artist, is with his three best friends at the beach giving tattoos when a little kid walks up to them and says he wants one. A sane person would know it’s not right to permanently ink up a third-grader, but since it seems like he doesn’t have a great track record of making solid decisions in the past, Scott figures he needs the practice and begins to tatt. As idiotic as that kid was, after just a few seconds he gets scared and runs away with just a two-inch-long black line on the exterior of his arm, so at least he had some sense.
Next thing we know, the kid’s dad, Ray (Bill Burr), is on Scott’s front porch shouting at Margie and demanding that she pay to have the tattoo removed from his son’s arm. My biggest question this entire scene was “how the hell did he find out where Scott lives?” Luckily, Margie thought the same thing as me, but when she asks him how he found their house he said “I have my ways”. Look, unless he was Ethan Hunt in disguise, how the hell would he be able to track down some random guy from the beach (that he never saw) on all of Staten Island? However, once cooler heads prevailed, Ray comes back to the house and asks Margie out for a cup of coffee, to which she accepts. Thus sparked a magnificent love that she had been longing for since her husband’s passing, letting Scott off the hook for an otherwise terrible decision.
Scott’s other bad (worse) choice is involving himself in a robbery with his three best friends that I mentioned earlier. Remember, none of them seem to have jobs aside from selling drugs, so what is their bright idea? Rob a pharmacy of course! Luckily, Scott thinks it’s stupid to rob a pharmacy too, so his friends just make him the lookout. Only, he’s the world’s worst lookout. While his friends are in the store committing a very serious crime, Scott, who suffers from depression and anxiety, is outside playing games on his phone. Simultaneously, the owners of the pharmacy show up and shoot, but don’t kill one of the guys, and a few seconds later the cops show up and arrest his other two friends. Luckily Scott gets away and his friends don’t rat him out, but as a viewer, it’s still hard for me to believe that in that tense of a situation he would be on his phone playing games.
What’s confusing about the robbery in terms of the film’s plot, is that it didn’t even serve as Scott’s wakeup call to get his act together. I’d like to think that watching his three best friends go to jail would’ve whipped him into shape, but it took getting in a fight with Ray and his mother kicking him out of the house for him to finally get it together. And that’s really where the story starts…which is interesting because that happened nearly 3/4 of the way through the movie.
As funny and charming as The King of Staten Island was, I do feel like it dragged a bit in the middle. We understood that Scott was a loser, but we were waiting for him to turn the corner, and it felt like we had to wait about 25 minutes too long for that to happen. As cute as Ray’s kids were, did we really need all the scenes with Scott walking them to school? Or the whole trip to his sister’s college? It’s not like he ended up enrolling at the school, so what was the point of showing us that he got along so well with all of the college kids? Maybe they intended the ending to be ambiguous, but I want to know what Scott is going to do with his life!
Will he be a firefighter? Well, he’s super scrawny and has A.D.D. so the studying and physical part of that job will be a challenge, so I’m going to cross that off the list.
Will he go to college? He didn’t graduate high school and seems uninterested with continuing his education on account of the A.D.D. (mentioned earlier), so that’s probably a no too.
Will he become a tattoo artist? This is what I don’t understand about the entire “tattoo artist” storyline. The whole movie, all we see are the shitty tattoos he does on his friends and his mom, leading us to believe that he’s not good, and it’s a far-fetched dream. But later in the movie, he draws an utterly flawless picture of Ice Flash, which then leads us to believe that he’s really good and that the tattoo artist dream might be conceivable? But THEN Ray lets him tattoo all over his back, and most of them are terrible, bringing me back to the thought that he could never be a tattoo artist.
Regardless, I think that Pete Davidson’s performance has officially established him as more than just a sketch-show and stand-up comedian. I was hesitant about him carrying a movie, being that he had never done it before and I never considered him a fantastic actor, but I think his relation to the character carried his performance and made it more authentic…plus it didn’t hurt to have Bill Burr, Steve Buscemi, and Marisa Tomei as costars. In all honesty, I don’t think the movie works without Burr. The energy he brought to the role is exactly what was needed, especially during the argumentative scenes.
At the end of the movie, I was clearly optimistic about his future with Kelsey (Bel Powley), but I still have no idea how he’s going to make money. There’s nothing wrong with being the custodian of the fire department, but don’t they want us to believe he’s meant for bigger and better things? I would like to think so.