Can’t Take It Back (2017)

Movie: Can’t Take It Back (2017), directed by Tim Shechmeister

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 8.13 miles, 9’01”/mile, 01:13:26 (recovery run)

 

Oh honey, where to start? Okay, so social media horror movies have been sort of a thing for the past few years (which only makes sense, since these days all the consarned young folks’re spending all day on the TikTok and the Twitter Dot Com), and I hadn’t watched one while running yet so I figured I’d give it a shot. After all, I REALLY liked 2014’s Unfriended, so even though practically every other film of the subgenre I’ve seen since then has fallen short, who knows from whence greatness might spring?

 

Not me. But I do know that greatness sure ain’t springin’ from Can’t Take It Back.

 

The premise is kindergarten-simple: Kristen is a generic high school senior except that she’s New in Town, and Not Blonde. Her friend Nicole is another generic high school senior who is not even New in Town. Nicole’s other equally-generic friend Amber has been mysteriously out of touch recently—by some strange coincidence, ever since she left a mean-spirited comment on a dead girl’s FaceBook page. (Hmmm.) Nicole and Kristen get drunk and they, too, leave nasty comments on the dead girl’s page. When she sobers up, Kristen tries to delete her comment, but, STRANGELY, finds she cannot. So then Amber turns up crazy and dead, and Nicole and Kristen start seeing weird crap in and around their computers, and wouldn’t you know it, the dead girl killed herself in 8th grade because she was mercilessly bullied, but she was also really psychic so now she’s out for spoooooky vengeance.

 

Now, you could certainly build a pretty solid movie around that plot. (Unfriended did; at its core, this story is practically identical.) Unfortunately, Can’t Take It Back suffers from subpar writing, which gives us cookie-cutter characters I couldn’t possibly like even if I could make myself care enough to try… or even tell them apart. And can anybody buy the idea that if a random high school girl tracks down a dead girl’s psychiatrist, that doctor is just going to barf out volumes of privileged patient info in an orgy of convenient exposition? Especially since said doctor is basically saying “yeah, she was getting bullied at school so I told her to spend a lot of time online, seemed like a good idea on paper but I guess it’s basically my fault she killed herself, lol.” 

 

A stellar cast might be able to compensate for the writing, but this is not that cast, so you get the double-whammy of terrible dialogue coming from the likes of Logan Paul’s Biceps. Just kidding! The entirety of Mr. Paul is in this movie, though, truth be told, I think his biceps might have delivered his lines more convincingly. And in the interest of the greater good, screw it, I’m just going to spoil this: if you have plans to sit through this cinematic endurance test just to see Logan Paul die, you will be sorely disappointed.

 

There’s really no coming back from a poor script AND a lousy cast, but just to make sure that you don’t extract one iota of positive experience from this movie, the makers went above and beyond to make everything as irritating as possible. I mean, I’m the unobservant guy who NEVER spots the boom mic, but even I was squirming at the lack of attention to detail sometimes. You’ve got a FaceTime-ish video call between Nicole and Logan-I-Mean-Clint, and even though Nicole is clearly shown holding her phone in portrait orientation, when they zoom to LoganClint in the call the shot is always landscape. You’ve got a pre-suicide Morgan-the-troubled-psychic in flashback taking topless selfies, but in multiple shots she’s framed so that you can clearly see she’s not actually topless. You’ve got Nicole so terrified by visions that she wets herself in history class, but her urine is, for some reason that completely escapes me, GREEN.

 

On top of that, while there have been plenty of scary onscreen ghosts through the years, you won’t find one here; the makeup on the ghosts just makes them look like they’re underpaid high schoolers with a weekend gig at the local pop-up haunted house. That’s not to say there aren’t a (very) few effective scares, but they generally aren’t the scenes with visible ghosts in them. Those rely on jump scares that they telegraph so far in advance you have time to make yourself a lovely sandwich. So that’s nice, I guess.

 

To top it all off, the last twenty minutes were just… boring. Kristen and her store-brand love interest track down ghost-girl’s also-psychic grandmother for advice, but by then you’re so done you just stare incredulous at a Blair Witch Project-style rambling hunt through some building as Kristen tries to find her guy in the dark. And you just. Don’t. Care. Bottom line: I’d sure like to recover the 88 minutes I spent watching this, but I… CAN’T TAKE IT BACK.

 

See what I did there? Tip your waitstaff.