Released: 15th May
Seen: 2nd December
In 2023, Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye decided to try his hand at acting with the miniseries The Idol and the reviews for that series were absolutely scathing on a level that very few shows could get. It had an infamously bad production history, and every episode was met with brutal vitriol as it became apparent to everyone paying even a little bit of attention that Abel was not a good actor. Honestly, the reviews were so bad that it seemed like it should stop him from ever being asked back to try and do anything even close to acting again… but alas, lessons were not learned and someone decided to give him a movie where he confirms he can’t act and his co-stars prove that even their incredible talents can’t save this crap.
Hurry Up Tomorrow tries to give its lead a fighting chance by telling a fictionalised story about a singer named Abel who is on a tour where he needs to be constantly talked into performing by his manager Lee (Barry Keoghan). His life is a mix of drugs, partying and performing and he just tries to make it through each show. Meanwhile, a superfan and arsonist, Anima (Jenna Ortega) has made her way across the country to one of Abel’s performances and, after a wild night of partying, ties him to a hotel bed and does a whole piece about what his music means before threatening to burn his hotel down with him inside it. This is all occasionally mixed with tracks from several of The Weeknd’s albums and a bunch of attempts at being meaningful but it’s mostly just fucking dull.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is one of those films that really thinks it’s doing something truly special when all it’s doing is being a pretentious bore. Everything about it, from the dull droning score to the visual style choices just reeks of someone who has seen every film in the Criterion collection and wants to make something high-brow but can’t do anything close to that. Its story is a basic blend of Misery and every concert movie you’ve ever seen and that could potentially be interesting if it was handled well but it’s really not. Characters deliver either meaningless or blunt dialogue, occasionally dance to a Weeknd song and try to explore the meaning of each song with a basic “Oh, this is about how your life sucks” message. It gets really dull really quickly.
What doesn’t help any of this is the fact that Abel just has absolutely no acting talent whatsoever. The man is playing himself and I don’t believe him for a single second, I don’t know how that is possible but it’s just the reality of it. I know that he can sing the songs in Hurry Up Tomorrow, they’re his songs. I have no doubt that he probably recorded special versions for this film but even in the moments when he’s performing them in concert, it feels like he’d rather be anywhere else. I don’t mean “His character clearly doesn’t want to perform and his manager keeps forcing him”, I just mean that there is no care given to how these numbers should be performed. There’s no energy, no life, the man is bringing nothing and we’re meant to think it’s genius.
Whoever decided that The Weeknd’s lifeless performance should be paired with actually talented actors like Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan is just cruel because those two are trying their hardest to elevate the material that they’ve been given, and in doing so just make the lead look even worse. It creates a weird, mishmash tone that never works. You have these good performers trying to make their performances work with someone who is giving them absolutely nothing to work with, and it’s just painful all around. You have entire scenes that are just Jenna Ortega trying her best to talk about how great some of The Weeknd’s music is and she’s doing her best to sell it, but it’s not working; none of it works.
This is easily the weirdest vanity project that any musician has forced into existence, a film that doesn’t even attempt to make the star look cool. The history of musicians doing vanity films is long and insane but they always at least try to make the musician in question look as cool as humanly possible while they do it but this one refuses to even try and that could have been refreshing, but it’s handled so poorly that it’s just kind of pathetic. The Weeknd just comes off as kind of a loser after everything that he goes through and one would hope that maybe that might give him some sympathy, but it doesn’t. There’s nothing there to sympathise with, nothing to latch onto, they have tried to present us a version of The Weeknd that would get anyone to stalk him but he’s not interesting enough to be worth that trouble.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is going on the pile of bad movies made by musicians who were lied to several times and convinced that they could act. It’s the kind of film that could ruin a reputation, fundamentally destroying any cool or bad boy image that The Weeknd might have tried to make for himself. No, instead it presents a whiny annoying character that has nothing of value to share with the world, it couldn’t even be bothered to give us a good soundtrack of new exciting songs that might justify it. It’s confirmation that this man is not charismatic enough to be an actor and should just stick to singing where he’s actually able to sell something. Hurry Up Tomorrow? I was just hoping that it would hurry up the hour and a half I had to spend with this film.
Movie Meister Reviews 