(IMAGE: Kandoo Releasing)
Kandoo Releasing. 2021. Thriller/Drama. 96 minutes.
RATING: 1.5 out of 4
If ever a movie were an unlikely contender for a sequel, Ask Me Anything would be it. Shot on a budget of $950,000 and grossing $172,452 (theatrical and DVD), it’s allegedly a cult movie, though the only way I can imagine it attaining such status is with Mr. Skin devotees, seeing as how it features brief nude scenes from a pre-Tomorrowland Britt Robertson. Robertson plays a high school graduate who blogs under the pseudonym of “Katie Kampenfelt” about her sex life, which involves two simultaneous affairs with married men (Justin Long and Christian Slater) and her meathead high school boyfriend (Max Carver). Plus there’s her job at a local bookstore under a grizzled military veteran (Martin Sheen), who may or may not be a rapist.
The movie’s big twist – SPOILER alert for a seven year-old obscurity – is that everything we have seen is “Katie’s” enhanced, augmented, unreliable blog account of her life. In reality, none of the major players in it look like movie stars, but regular folks, including her. Oh, and after taking a phone call she drove away mysteriously and was never seen again. The end.
Novelist Allison Burnett (a man) wrote and directed the film based on his own book Undiscovered Gyrl, after having built a career as a successful screenwriter with Autumn in New York and Underworld: Awakening. And now, much to very few moviegoers’ demands if any, he has written and directed the Ask Me Anything sequel Another Girl. And boy, does it jump through some strange hoops in order to get around to telling almost the same story over again.
In this one, Sammi Hanratty (Salem, Shameless) plays Elle, a girl around Katie’s age who becomes obsessed with the original novel, although in this reality, it’s written by someone other than Burnett. Indeed, she feels that the book is so real it must be based on a true story. And when she finds what seems to be Katie’s blog from the book, she sends in an email, receiving a response from “Katie.” But the author of the book denies it’s him, or connected to him in any way. This meta-level, by the way, only serves to make Elle seem extra naive – it wouldn’t change much to have the story set in the same reality as the “actual” blog, but it would make her less of a dupe. Or a dope. Take your pick.
Elle confides in Katie via text as she proceeds on her own affair with a married man, in this case her new boss Dave (Supergirl‘s Peter Gadiot). One might think that the real Katie could steer her clear of such things right away, but then both this sequel and the original deliberately obfuscate who the “real” Katie is. Which might be something worth dealing with in a substantive way for more than just the finale, which I won’t spoil except to say it’s an equally abrupt left turn into a dead end. At times we get new landscape shots interspersed as we hear other people write to Katie, but that tells us nothing really, except that folks online like to write to fictional characters. Welcome to the Internet.
Budgetary issues are apparent; at one point, Elle describes a hot sex scene with Dave that would have been much more interesting and/or exciting to actually show. Presumably either the money wasn’t there to pay actors for nudity, or the ability to keep the shoot intimate was absent.
And while Katie juggled three guys, while still having time for issues with father figures, Elle just has the one. No offense to Gadiot, but Dave’s not that much of a catch. Hanratty looks the Hollywood ideal of a young skinny blonde, but she begins the movie by believing a work of fiction is real, and learns almost nothing subsequent to that, so she’s got a few red flags of her own. And unlike Britt Robertson’s Katie, she rarely seems like she’s having much fun. Only in one sequence where she tries to make Dave jealous by pointedly hanging out with a black man – to make him both angry and racist, apparently – does she seem ahead of the game.
Beyond the problem of a non-dynamic character in a less complex retread of the same story, however, this entire sequel has the fundamental flaw of following up on aspects other than what we want to see. What happened to the real Katie? Who knows? How does Elle’s story relate? Well, maybe we’ll have a vague hint by the end. Like the Paranormal Activity franchise after the first couple of episodes, it’s a whole lot of buildup to something that doesn’t really lead to the larger story that’s been teased.
But please, Mr. Burnett, do not take that as an invitation to write a threequel.
Editor’s Note: In an earlier version, this review cited widely published box office figures indicating the 2015 movie ‘Ask Me Anything’ grossed $48,710, primarily in the home market. At the filmmaker’s request, further research was conducted, indicating ‘Ask Me Anything’ may have grossed as much as $172,452 through domestic DVD sales, against an estimated budget of $950,000. Relevant financial data can be found here: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Ask-Me-Anything#tab=summary.
###