I’ll start off by saying it’s very difficult for me to offer this movie any praise. Its debut comes just behind the more critically successful To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the Netflix movie starring Noah Centineo and Lana Condor. I expected significantly more than the sewage I forced myself to watch for two unrelenting hours. After all, Netflix has been on the rise for reviving old and exhausted teen tropes in refreshingly bold and youthful romantic comedies, the most noteworthy being To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, but Sierra Burgess Is A Loser falls utterly short.
The movie stars Shannon Purser, a memorable face from Netflix’s Stranger Things, as Sierra Burgess. She is the unconventionally confident underdog heroine who, in an attempt to win over the dreamboat jock Jamey, becomes unlikely friends with picture-perfect Veronica, the school’s popular girl.
I could point out the shaky filming and the gross sepia filter. I could talk about the atrocious acting, the anticlimactic and purely nonexistent romantic premise, the lousy and random subplots that begin and end nowhere. I could go off on the unending, unrealistic cliches, the consistently disappointing dialogue, the vague allusions to random motifs that inevitably mean nothing to the characters. All of these aspects alone could accurately encompass my feelings for the movie, without me even needing to mention that the entire plot is centered around a psychotic catfishing scandal on which the main friendship, romantic intrigue, and character development is also built on, and consequently shattered.
I don’t understand what is so magnetizing about any part of Purser’s character. Sure, she is relatable in that she’s confident but not cocky, and self-conscious without being terribly insecure. I can see how the audience could be drawn that awkward but somewhat quirky charm, but once I get past the general acceptance that this was how Sierra Burgess was going to be, I can’t take it any further and convince myself she is still worth my attention after her actions in the rest of the movie.
While Jamey had genuinely convinced himself he was falling in love with Veronica, Sierra is unnervingly happy using her, as her newly-appointed best friend, to toy with his feelings and hide who she actually is behind false pretense.
The movie even takes it so far as to see Veronica switch places with Sierra just as Jamey is about to kiss her; gross in context, gross in reality, and even worse seeing Sierra walk away from it smiling and feeling incredible about herself, while Veronica is back in her place as Sierra’s pawn in front of Jamey. The whole thing, in one word, is wrong.
I’m concerned and, to say the least, disturbed with Sierra’s character development. It’s unnerving how she’s okay with everything she’s done and can live her life like this; she’s okay with catfishing the boy she likes, playing with him and his emotions, using her friend and justifying it all with alleged but undetectable insecurities.
Finally, Sierra delivers a severely low blow that is the perfect validation to top off my ever widening hatred for her character. After seeing Jamey kiss Veronica, Sierra puts Veronica’s humiliating online break-up on blast in front of the whole school at a football game. After this, it was hard for me to feel bad for her.
The fact that Sierra treated her friend like this, even though it’s ridiculous, and then expected to be forgiven for the mess she made with a temper tantrum and subpar song about sunflowers, honestly made me want to flip a table.
I wanted a plot I could be drawn into. I wanted an opening scene that would steal my breath or make me double over in laughter. I wanted a character that I could love, hate, or love to hate. I at least wanting decent cinematography that didn’t make me feel like I was reliving a migraine. I found almost none of this in Sierra Burgess is a Loser.
Instead, I found a tiring plot, a mundane opening, flimsy cinematography—a movie that had nothing going for it at all. I hate Sierra Burgess, and I hate the fact that I hate her because I hate that I took time out of my day to watch this movie in the first place.