In the Heights

In the Heights

The story of Usnavi, a bodega owner who has mixed feelings about closing his store and retiring to the Dominican Republic or staying in Washington Heights.

  • Released: 2021-06-10
  • Runtime: 143 minutes
  • Genre: Drama, Music, Romance
  • Stars: Anthony Ramos, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera, Olga Merediz, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Gregory Diaz IV, Marc Anthony, Jimmy Smits, Stephanie Beatriz, Dascha Polanco, Noah Catala, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mateo Gómez, Patrick Page, Olivia Perez, Analia Gomez, Dean Scott Vazquez, Mason Vazquez, Delila Ramos, Valentina, Christopher Jackson, Susan Pourfar, María Hinojosa, Ryan Woodle, Doreen Montalvo, Ilia Jessica Castro, Yesy Garcia, Jonathan Arana, Jennifer Hernandez, Amp Ngernrungruangroj, Bairam Rizai, Lavinia Jones Wright, Alexandra Campos, Rhapsody James, Ariana S. Gomez, Ariana Greenblatt, Hugh M Jones III, Luís Miranda, Javier Muñoz, The Kid Mero, Seth Stewart, Luis A. Miranda Jr.
  • Director: Jon M. Chu
 Comments
  • SaidNDone - 13 January 2023
    Can't get out of its own way
    "In the Heights" hits some nice highs when focusing on character moments and during a couple of set pieces but fails to rise above mediocrity due to it being burdened by an "everything but the kitchen sink" writing philosophy. You can tell the people who made this really did care, but maybe "too much".

    The characters have some nice chemistry and when they're allowed to breathe and actually interact sparks do fly but that rarely happens. Instead the movie is bogged down by a constant stream of musical numbers and inorganic attempts at social statements. It tries to comment on everything from illegal immigration, to immigrant identity conflicts, to latin pride, to racism, to college affordability, to 'gentrification', to class -- but fails to say anything of value about any of these topics.

    Any single one of the topics mentioned above would require a full length feature to be done justice and cramming all of them into one movie (especially a musical with 5 main characters and a huge chunk of its runtime dedicated to showpieces) leads to entropy.

    It often feels like the movie is artificially creating problems just to point out they exist rather than them developing in an organic way that would cause you to care. Some of the most egregious examples of this are found in the college cost / alienation storyline (which is an overdone trope that feels 100% manufactured given schools like Stanford provide full rides to everyone outside the top 15-20% of US income & Stanford's student body is 20%+ hispanic) and in the illegal immigration / DREAMer storyline (which is a stress millions of people worry about daily, but this movie creates then magically resolves for the impacted character with the wave of a wand). Despite having an innumerable amount of storylines and 2.5 hour runtime, the movie doesn't actually seem to go anywhere because none of its storylines are actually developed.

    It generally feels like the movie just can't get out of its own way and let the characters / settings speak for themselves. Instead it frantically ticks through issue after issue like a checklist, inorganically "telling" the audience "this social issue exists and you should care" instead of moving us to those conclusions using the characters, setting, and plot (mostly because it doesn't have the runtime to organically develop everything it tries to cover).

    And this franticness then bleeds into the musical numbers, which are often unfocused and overly-long -- switching genres (and sometimes even subject matter) multiple times mid-song and running across multiple scenes. They often feel like purposeless non-sequiturs because they'll start in one place (a character upbeat rapping about their job) and end up somewhere else entirely 6 minutes and two interludes later (the character singing the blues about unrequited love).

    Beyond the impact to musical pieces, the inorganicness of some of the storylines often blends with the preachy obstinance that pervaded Hollywood social commentaries from ~2017-2021, distilling into a general misguided smugness that both makes the film already feel dated less than 2 years later and leads to its lowest lows (the shaved ice guy destroying a kid's ice-cream cone because it wasn't "latin enough", Daniela lecturing a service worker for calling her "ma'am" instead of "senora", the general anti-development/NIMBY theme of the movie, the movie treating all Caribbean hispanics as a monolith with the same progressive sociopolitical views).

    Luckily, there are segments where the movie focuses and pulls up for air to briefly achieve greatness (Claudia's song, the fiesta/club numbers, chemistry between the couples / families). But these moments are too few and far between to push the overall movie beyond mediocrity.

    Overall, the movie had potential but feels more lost in a New England liberal art school grad's spotless dream of what "The Heights" should be rather than something grounded in actual reality.
  • edwin-wks - 28 March 2022
    Hamilton Lite
    Where have I heard this before? Oh, that's right, Hamilton. Depending on how you see it, In The Heights is either Hamilton Lite or Hamilton is an amped-up In The Heights. The songs lose their edge if you are familiar with Miranda's other work because they all end up sounding similar, no matter how good the lyrics are. Also the way Usnavi plays up the way he pronounces "Washington" bothers me because he does not carry a Hispanic accent in the way he talks.