2137. The Easiest Thing Is Making Everything Harder (2018)

Starring: Danna Paola, Daniela Wong, Alosian Vivancos

Director: Rene Bueno

Running Time: 95 mins

The Easiest Thing Is Making Everything Harder (Lo más sencillo es complicarlo todo) is a Mexican film about a woman who has been in love with a man for years, but when she finds out he is set to be married to another woman, she sets about a plan to break them up.

I hated this film. While it’s nothing that we’ve never seen before, I really thought that the movie business had moved on as a whole from this sort of film, leaving the genre only for stupid Nickelodeon or Disney Channel films aimed at 8 year old girls. However, that’s not the case, as watching this film is nothing more than being subjected to an hour and a half of tedious and trivial ‘drama’, as you follow a deeply unlikable main character all over the place as she desperately tries to get everything she wants, no matter how undeserving.

It’s such a basic requirement of any story – get the audience’s symapthy and they will be engaged – but when you have a central character who’s so stupid and unlikable from the very beginning, there’s absolutely no reason for any viewer to care even one bit for her.

As a result, I found myself hating this film from the very beginning, and although I don’t like to judge a book by its cover, I found the main character’s whiney and selfish actions so irritating and awful that I found myself digging my heels in, resisting any sort of change or development that the film tries to push her through.

Of course, the movie tries to make her a proper human, and eventually turns her from a selfish mess of a teenager who won’t stop for even a moment to think about another member of her species, to a shining light of generosity and level-headedness. But I was never going to believe that from the start, and every single moment where the main character is meant to learn something and change her personality a little, I wasn’t convinced in the slightest, making me more and more frustrated as the film dragged on and on.

What’s even more annoying about this film is that, even though it stars what I think are a group of adults, it still acts like it’s a high school movie, feeling incredibly reminiscent of Mean Girls. Now, while the main character is meant to be a high school senior, the fact that she looks like an adult, the way in which she acts, along with the fact that she hangs around with actual grown-ups all meant that I couldn’t ever look at this film as a high school movie, but rather a group of adults acting like children without any sense of the real world around them.

I don’t like to rant on about this sort of thing, but when you’ve got a film that’s so persistent in its idiocy, it’s really hard to ignore, and there’s very little it ever does to genuinely rectify its biggest issues, never ever providing anything in the way of an emotionally interesting or even simply entertaining story, but rather pushing through with something that’s really unpleasant and endlessly irritating to watch.

The only saving grace of the film is a couple of random breaks where it makes references to some classic Hollywood films. Now, it’s clear that they’ve been thrown in there to give the appearance that the movie has some sort of a cultural conscience (which actually annoyed me even more), but I still enjoyed seeing its takes on a couple of classic scenes from the likes of Gone With The Wind, Titanic and more.

Overall, however, I pretty much hated everything about this film. It’s annoying, it’s superficial, it’s stupid, and it’s absolutely incessant in its awfulness, with nothing in the way of good humour or drama, nor any characters that can illicit any sympathy or intrigue from you at any point. That’s why I’m giving this a 4.4.