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Load of rubbish!!

A Major Disappointment

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This film tells the story of a very awkward teenager, who does the weirdest things and has the strangest hobbies.I can't say I enjoyed this film. Jeff is just too weird,. If I was in any way an acquaintance of his, I would run a mile. The pace of the story is slow, and I find it rather boring. The twisted story doesn't appeal to me either.

This film helps us to understand something I've too often wondered about, which is how a serial killer got to the state of mind where he could act out his crimes. It humanizes Jeffry Dahmer from someone who was a monster, to someone who was a pathetic, unloved youngster who was unable to make loving connections with his family and fellow humankind. All told from someone who directly contributed to, and apparently regrets Dahmer's wretched condition, which makes the story all the more believable, heart-wrenching and horrific.

"My Friend Dahmer" attracted me due to the last word in the title. I was already pretty familiar with, and fascinated by Jeffrey's reign of murder from countless depictions since his trial. I anticipated an interesting and insightful treatise of the titular subject, not recalling any friend being mentioned before.However true to real life, the plodding pace and unremarkable content failed to deliver. There were neither surprises nor train wrecks. The actors had so little to work with that none of their performances stood out. None of the characters hooked me. It was dull and failed to differentiate between the subject's evolution into depravity and presumed madness, and the "normal" growth of any other disaffected person. My reactions at the end were "so what?" and "is that all?". This yawner was not even entertaining.

Taking place over the course of Jeffrey Dahmer's last year in high school, and culminating with the faithful meeting between Dahmer (Ross Lynch) and Steven Hicks (Dave Sorboro), writer/director Marc Meyers's My Friend Dahmer is based on the graphic novel by John Backderf (played in the film by Alex Wolff), who attended the same school as Dahmer, and formed a pseudo-friendship with him. The film is tonally brilliant, coming across like The Breakfast Club (1985) directed by David Fincher, perfectly capturing 80s tackiness. Narratively, however, it's extremely plodding, and could easily have been trimmed by 20 minutes. It's also difficult to see what Meyers was trying to achieve; other than a couple of brief moments, we're never given any real access to Dahmer's interiority, so he remains an enigma, always at arm's length (which could have been the point). But is Meyers asking us to feel sympathy for Dahmer because he had a difficult adolescence, came from a broken home, couldn't make friends in school. Or is this simply a character study (if we didn't know it was about Dahmer, it could be any number of examinations of high school awkwardness)?The lack of clarity regarding the film's theme is compounded by the scenes where it looks as if Dahmer is about to murder someone, only to stop at the last second. This is an especially strange way to generate tension, insofar as we already know his first murder was Hicks. Also, if the film is actually trying to say something of societal worth regarding serial killers, directionless youth, nature vs. nuture etc, trying to draw an audience into the narrative with the prospect of murder probably isn't the way to go about it. The film also fails to really get into the issues of Dahmer's sexuality, and his confusion and frustration about being gay. It's worth a look, but if you're already familiar with Dahmer's story, you won't find much insight here.5/10