Afterlife of the Party: It has its moments but mostly pretty average

I don't really know how to categorize this film. Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? Is it a spiritual film? Is it a film made for teenagers? Was it trying to be a tear-jerker?

The film succeeds in being relatively entertaining but I really feel as though they could have done a lot more with this than they did and overall parts of it were unrealistic even for something that obviously is fiction anyway.

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So the story begins with rather self-absorbed "Cassie" who is celebrating her birthday week (not just a day) and making herself the center of attention and well, acting like a diva at multiple venues. Her roommate, Lisa, has been friend with her for her entire life but is a bit more serious about having a professional future. Cassie is more of a live in the now type person and parties like crazy.

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During one of the party nights in the week that Cassie has dubbed "Cassie-Palooza" Lisa encourages Cassie to call it a night but Cassie ignores her advice and is actually kind of mean to her. Cassie proceeds to stay out all night and then in a drunken stupor falls in the bathroom at her own apartment, hits her head and dies.

We are spared any sort of gore because this is clearly meant to be an all-ages movie or at the maximum PG-13.

When Cassie wakes up she is in a purgatory of sorts and is met by a temporary guardian angel who has told her that she has unfinished business on earth and that her future has not yet been determined by the "board" about whether she is going "up" or "down" which is presumed to mean heaven or hell.

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So Cassie has a certain amount of time in order to "right some wrongs" on earth but it isn't made clear to her what those wrongs are nor what she has to do in order to fix them. Now this is where I start nitpicking the inconsistencies in the film. Most people can not see her because she is a spirit, but animals and certain children can see her and so can her roommate Lisa but no one else can. She also can touch and move things despite not being of the material world but only when other people aren't around and only certain things.

I know that the entire story isn't meant to be super plausible anyway, but things like this bother me.

Cassie routinely goes through various crises because she doesn't know how she is going to communicate which some particular person but she is complaining about her inability to talk to other people on earth to the one person that can hear her. Seems to me like this would have a pretty easy solution but they never utilize it.

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_{yall know what i'm talking about}

So the underlying tale of someone dying prematurely and being able to interact with the people that were close to her in her life after her death is an interesting concept and I really feel like a lot more could be done with this. There were a couple of times that i got teary-eyed so you could say that most of the actors are pretty decent but there are a few people, most notably the people who play Cassie's mother and father, that are pretty poor actors and were a bad selection. Consequently their IRL names are Adam and Gloria Garcia but as far as I can tell they are not related or married.

Should I watch it?

I'm not a teenager but I try to relate to all manner of films regardless of what the target audience is so I gave this one a chance even though the trailer makes it pretty evident that they were looking for a teenage / young adult audience with this. It is technically classified as a comedy but I wouldn't say that I found very much of it to be funny either. Parts of it were endearing and entertaining but a lot of it is pretty cringe as well. I dunno, I suppose for the right person that has the correct amount of boredom in their lives this could be worth it, for others it's gonna be too predictable, inconsistent, and corny.

I don't normally put numbers on things but I would probably give this a 5 / 10 because it was entertaining in the end.