Review of Before We Go, directed by Chris Evans

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

Because my budget was so limited during this time, as I had very few income sources, I was thinking a lot about what I spent my money on. I don’t like spending money on streaming services to begin with me when I have a very good library branch near me, as well as the fact I know what I like.

Kanopy is one of the services that my local library provides for free if you have a library card, so I’ve been using it quite a bit during this time of being somewhat financially strained. We get 45 “tickets” a month, which correlates to about twenty or so movies, and I tend to use about half of them during the month because I can’t spend all of my time watching movies.

I watched Before We Go one night when I stumbled upon it on the movie options page, and it was a pretty brief watch. This movie goes by quickly if you’re not over-analyzing it—although, with some preliminary thoughts, I didn’t find much to analyze and think about.

Let’s get into the review!

After missing the last train, a woman joins forces with a man she meets at the train station for an unforgettable night.

At the beginning of this movie, our female lead, Brooke Dalton, is rushing through Grand Central Station to make the last train back to her home. She drops her phone on the way, and busker Nick Vaughan is the one to pick it up. It helps that Brooke misses the last train and the station is closing, and Nick approaches her to return the phone she dropped.

Brooke can’t even get a cab back to Boston because she was robbed earlier, leaving her with only her clothes and phone on her. Nick offers to pay for the cab back to her home, but when his cards are all declined by the cab, he tries to call his friend and his phone dies too. He offers her a hotel room after that, but then Brooke tells him she has to be back in Boston by the end of the night or else.

He then realizes there’s somewhere he knows where stolen purses are pilfered and sold. They go there, and while he goes to look through the building, Brooke calls her husband on a payphone. She makes the mistake of telling some cops about the operation, and the shop owners, who actually had her bag, flee with it. Nick also ends up assaulted, and the duo decides to go to one of Nick’s friend’s wedding receptions to try and bum some money off someone.

There are romantic undertones as these two start having deeper conversations. Turns out Brooke was going home to give her husband a surprise and Nick isn’t from the city either, as he was in town for an audition. People think they’re a musician group while walking to the wedding, as they have these conversations, and they put on a bad rendition of “My Funny Valentine.”

Brooke reaches out to one of her friends after this and begs her to get a letter she wrote to her husband. She then offers to Nick to pose as his girlfriend at the wedding reception, as his ex-girlfriend is going to be there, but when he sees his ex with a new man, he leaves. Turns out they’ve been broken up for six years, and he’s sore about it because she specifically rejected his proposal.

Brooke tells him to reconcile with her, and he finds closure when he listens to her and learns she is now pregnant. The duo continues onward with the night, and they end up at a psychic. It’s there, after borrowing his phone, that Brooke learns the letter was not stopped. She tells Nick she learned her husband was having an affair, and the letter was her ending their marriage.

When he called earlier, she thought it was a sign to continue the marriage. Brooke and Nick go to a restaurant, and Nick tries to reassure her, but Brooke decides to go to Indiana. Nick follows her and they get into a fight, but then end up in a hotel room together booked by his friend. It’s there they share kisses and a moment of peace and quiet together.

Morning comes back around and they head back to the train station. Nick goes to a payphone and calls his past self to tell him to accept what’s to come, and they kiss for the last time. Brooke discovers a greeting card from the hotel on her and a message written on it from Nick, ending the movie with her smiling about it.

Overall Thoughts

For me, while the premise of this movie can be interesting, the execution falls flat. I think the largest problem happens to be the characters themselves, as both of the main characters are kind of dull to me. We have an organic moment where they meet and are stick together, but the way they don’t separate throughout the night wasn’t realistic to me.

What I’m trying to say is that this movie asks you to suspend reality and accept the situation presented on the screen. I have kudos to this female protagonist for going off with a strange man you’ve literally just met and then share a hotel room with him, but that definitely would not be me or anyone I know in the real world.

That said, I can see someone out there liking this movie, faults and all. It wasn’t my cup of tea and I did want to give up while watching it, but I kept saying “there’s only XYZ minutes left” and telling myself to push through it.

Go watch it if it interests you, but maybe don’t go in with high expectations.

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