The King of Staten Island (2020)
Review of The King of Staten Island, directed by Judd Apatow
It seems fitting that I write this at the beginning of 2022, as the world is enamored with Pete Davidson and how he managed to date a Kardashian. That’s not why I watched this movie. I’ve only been to Staten Island once for my college’s honor program orientation.
Our head honcho, my wonderful professor from my various Asian cinema courses, took our entire program to the Staten Island Ferry, where we then managed to meet a Malaysian artist inside his bunker. It was the strangest, most surreal experience. We did archery in this guy’s home with real steel-tipped arrows, and as my group would retrieve our arrows we had to duck down and be careful because the other group’s arrows would fly through the open doorway (he never installed any doors) in his home.
I did get some bomb Sri Lankan food on Staten Island that day, which makes up for all of my trauma. My weird memories aside, I thought of that moment when I saw this on the options of what you could watch on HBO Max and for nostalgia’s sake I started watching it.
My first thought/summary is this: do I ever want to see Pete Davidson in a movie ever again? No. I can confidently say I never want to see Davidson in a movie, but I also can’t stand him in SNL skits sometimes so I might be a tad biased when it comes to that. That being said, let’s start this review.
A high school dropout from Staten Island battles mental illness, childhood trauma, and his dreams of becoming a tattoo artist.
Our main character in The King of Staten Island is Scott Carlin (Pete Davidson), a twenty-four-year-old high school dropout that does not seem like he is going to get anymore in life. His younger sister Claire (Maude Apatow from Euphoria) worries that once she goes off to college, Scott is going to do something really stupid, and when she finally leaves with her best friend (Pauline Chalamet; yes, that is Timothée Chalamet’s older sister), that fear does indeed come true.
Scott is a pretty self-destructive kid. He has mental health issues alongside a plethora of physical conditions, he constantly is smoking weed, and he has some major trauma from the fact his dad died when he was young. The group he hangs out with does not fare any better, as they all kind of seem like deadbeats on the path of life, except for Kelsey (Bel Powley).
She wants to have a relationship with Scott but he’s a classic idiotic man who just wants to sleep with her. Kelsey is the only person in that group who talks about wanting to make Staten Island into something more than being the joke of New York City and she wants to work to make it a more beautiful place that people desire—like Brooklyn, she compares it to in the movie.
Scott’s dream is to become a tattoo artist, but his uncle offers him a job at the restaurant he owns, thus making Scott into a professional working man making minimum wage. But one day things start to go awry when he randomly gives a nine-year-old a tattoo, and when the kid’s father shows up at his house screaming, Scott’s mother (Marisa Tomei) and the kid’s father start a romance and Scott does not take to that well at all.
He yells at his mom, goes to the guy’s ex-wife to get information, and then becomes even more self-destructive in the process. When they go and meet his sister, it ends up become a pissing match that ruins the evening. That sets the tone for the rest of the movie, as Scott is kicked out, bums around other people’s couches, and then ends up reconciling with everyone and trying to put a massive Bandaid on his life.
The King of Staten Island is something a lot of people can probably relate to, but it is not something I found particularly entertaining.
Davidson was the glue that held it all together, as I suspect a chunk of this is autobiographical at times (his father died in 9/11 as a firefighter, he is from Staten Island, and he is a known tattoo junkie), so his performance rings with this authenticity that lacks for the other characters. It was well-acted, don’t get me wrong, but I just found the overall movie to be lackluster. When it tries to be funny I just didn’t care for the humor at all.
It’s the story of one kid trying to learn how to make. Sure he’s twenty-four and doesn’t seem to have much ahead of him, and no one really tries to help him outside of offering a job, but some of us grow up a little later in life and come to realize what our passions truly are. There is no judgement from me about that, I think he just is a lost kid with a lot of trauma to sort out.
Overall Thoughts
I found this movie to be okay. Not great, but also not bad. At the end of the day I think it represents a unique coming-of-age story that brings Staten Island, often the place New Yorkers joke about wanting to eradicate, to the limelight and humanizes it a bit more.
It’s rare that we see Staten Island represented in such a manner and I think that was important to see. Did I care for the main character? A little bit, yes.
Davidson does a decent job because he basically is that character, so he doesn’t need much besides putting on a slightly new personality. At the end of the day I found this movie hard to watch because I wasn’t sucked into the story enough and the stakes weren’t high enough for me to be like oh no what’ll happen next to this poor kid. It’s not my cup of tea, but I’m sure the movie is someone else’s at the end of the day.
