Reel Entropy

2/10 In the Heights is borderline unwatchable. Everything is bad. Alice Brooks’ cinematography is downright incompetent, and every decision by editor Myron Kerstein is questionable at best and obviously wrong at worst. Jon M. Chu is a weak director, befitting a project that seems to have been someone else’s afterthought from the first day of production to release. To make matters worse, writer/producer Quiara Alegría Huedes, who co-wrote the original musical with producer/actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, has made some baffling decisions in adaptation that beg serious questions about how well she understands her own work.

Washington Heights, Manhattan, summer- Usnavi de la Vega (Anthony Ramos) runs a corner bodega as the summer reaches its peak. He dreams both of getting back to his native Dominican Republic and of Vanessa Morales (Melissa Barrera), a salon worker who herself dreams of getting out to Lower Manhattan and opening her own business. Meanwhile, Nina Rosario (Leslie Grace) has returned from Stanford University, and struggles to tell her father Kevin (Jimmy Smits) that she doesn’t want to go back. Benny (Corey Hawkins), Kevin Rosario’s employee and Nina’s boyfriend before she went to Stanford, rekindles their romance. The story is told by de la Vega to his children at least a decade in hindsight from his father’s idyllic coastal bar El Suanito back in the Caribbean.

In the Heights is clearly not worthy of the show it was based on. There are constant, basic film language problems that call less for a review and more of a scene-by-scene breakdown of all its failures.