The King of Staten Island is a 2020 film directed by Judd Apatow starring Pete Davidson and Bill Burr. It follows a high school dropout who eventually learns to believe in himself and work hard.

This film centers around Scott, a 24 year old loser who still lives with his widowed mother. After he accidentally tattoos a nine year old, his mother meets a firefighter named Ray, who eventually acts like a surrogate father to Scott, and mentors him into becoming a better person. This movie doesn’t have a very conventional plot, and feels instead more like real life, and this both helps and hinders the movie greatly.

This movie is extremely uncompromising. What I mean is that, most movie’s compress their story. They don’t show the main character doing everything, because that would lead to too many needless scenes. This movie tends to feel extremely grounded and focused around real life. Character’s talk very realistically, and the events that happen in the movie, although unlikely and strange, still feel real, as often, our reality is stranger than our fiction. However, the trade off to this grounded realism feeling, is that the movie is way too long. It compresses virtually nothing, and too many scenes are pointless. They’re admittedly funny scenes, but ultimately they don’t help with anything. There’s unnecessary sub-plots like Scott’s restaurant having a fight club to see who gets tips, or Scott and his friends robbing a pharmacy and getting shot at. These scenes are absolutely entertaining, but they’re completely unnecessary and serve no purpose.

The absolute biggest problem with this movie however, is that there’s no pivot. In similar films to this, where it’s about a character’s redemption, there’s one moment the audience can point to and relate as being the main character’s pivot, or the moment where he changes to become a better human being. An example is in the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s character finally manages to get his fellow newscaster to love him. The King of Staten Island completely lacks a moment like this. It shows Scott working in the firehouse, and becoming somewhat of a better tattoo artist, but there’s no one moment the audience can point to as being the climax. The intended moment might’ve been when he saves a man who was shot from dying, but that doesn’t fit with his character arc. His flaw is being lazy and lacking self esteem, not being a nihilist or a horrible person. At the start of the film he still would’ve saved that person, so having that as the climax makes no sense and feels wrong.

However, this movie is still fun to watch. At first I didn’t like Pete Davidson’s character, but he grew on me, and by the end of the film I was rooting for him. Bill Burr is hilarious as Ray, and he has some incredibly funny lines. There are some good moments in this film, and some heartfelt ones, like when the firemen are discussing Scott’s father, and telling crazy stories about him. Moments like these are what this movie should’ve focused on, instead of dumb scenes about stoners robbing people.

All in all, despite it’s flaws, ultimately this is a good movie. It’s one that people should make their own judgements about, as this is a very polarizing film. Still, I enjoyed it, and it’s a fun film.