Time: 91 Minutes
Cast:
Izaac Wang as Chris “Dìdi” Wang
Joan Chen as Chungsing Wang
Director: Sean Wang

I kept seeing a lot of praise for Didi, a coming of age movie. So I went in very open minded despite coming of age movies not really being my thing, expecting to find this to be okay at the very least. I was in for a rude awakening.

At its core, Didi is yet another coming of age story about an outcast teenager that you’ve seen many times before. All the cliches you’ve seen in these kinds of movies are on full display, it almost felt like a worse version of Mid90s, and I’m not cutting it slack even if it was apparently inspired by or based on the director’s life growing up. It’s a very dull and boring movie, the plot generally doesn’t have anything of interest. The movie does clearly establish multiple times that it is firmly set in 2008 and puts technology and social media reminiscent of the late 2000s on display, with emphasis on YouTube and Facebook. This might be a play for nostalgia considering its obsession of having multiple shots focussing on old computer screens, but I’m not nostalgic at all so these moments didn’t do anything for me. It would be one thing if the movie just suffered from being boring and familiar, but then it has to throw in an absolutely insufferable and unlikable protagonist, which practically ruined the entire experience. Sure, the main character Chris Wang is 13 years old and the movie at least recognises him as being unlikable, but I’m not sure that we were intended to actively hate him for the entirety of the runtime. It’s one thing making a massively flawed character who remains compelling enough that you are invested in their story. With Chris, it is impossible to sympathise with him on any level, even when the movie is wanting you to. I spent the entire runtime hoping to latch onto something about him to like, and I found that I couldn’t root for him on any level. Even the interactions between him and his friends with the whole ‘boy culture’ stuff was uncomfortable to sit through, especially with their conversations. If this character was drawing from the director’s own life, maybe this was one area where he could’ve taken some creative liberties. The movie introduces so many subplots and with the multiple ways Chris messes up and burns bridges, you’d think that this is in service of him undergoing an arc. But the way that everything is wrapped up is beyond unsatisfying. They virtually do nothing to explore anything with all the conflicts that were established, and it is the kind of movie where deep rooted and long lasting issues are resolved by a single conversation. I spent 90 minutes watching the main character being the worst person just to have no actual payoff. Chris doesn’t even go through character growth, so it’s charitable calling Didi a coming of age film.

The acting is generally good. I’ve said a lot about the main character already, but to actor Izaac Wang’s credit, he played him very well. His performance made Chris feel grounded and real and perhaps even made some of the horrible material work just a little better with his convincing acting. Joan Chen is really good as Chris’s mother and was the highlight of the film. Her story is about her coming to terms with the life she is leading as a mother and how it’s not the one she imagined for herself. That’s the only part where there is any kind of sincere earnestness in this movie, and the way her storyline was resolved wasn’t even satisfying. It’s a shame that she’s not in this movie a lot either, if anything I wished it was about her instead.

The direction from Sean Wang was fine enough. It is decently shot and seems to capture the time period correctly, even if the 2000s needledrops can get grating and obvious. I don’t have a lot of complaints for the technical side when compared to the rest of the movie.

Good performances aside, Didi is a typical and hollow coming of age story that’s difficult to resonate with, and was off-putting and insufferable to watch. It is legitimately one of my least favourite movies of 2024, and I kind of hated watching it.