"Extremely Unique Dynamic" - Film Review
Extremely Unique Dynamic can be described as mumblecore meets the millennial generation that grew up on the YouTube boom of the aughts. Ryan (Harrison Xu) and Danny (Ivan Leung) are lifelong best friends who moved to Los Angeles twelve years ago with dreams of fame and fortune. They spent their childhood making little YouTube parody videos in the hopes that Ryan would become an actor and Danny would become a rapper. In these twelve years, they’ve been sent out for (and rejected for) all the same roles, so Ryan is calling it quits and moving to Canada to be with his fiancé. For one more week, Ryan and Danny will be together in Los Angeles. Danny wants to spend it saying goodbye to the landmarks they loved visiting together, but Ryan wants to make a movie…about two guys making a movie…about two guys making a movie.
In a time when blockbusters are breaking their backs trying to out-meta each other, there’s something refreshing about Extremely Unique Dynamic. Inherently, the film is layered; there are at least three films within the main film. Just like Ryan, Xu is an actor who has extensive marketing experience and Leung is the classic actor and musician combo. He gets to show off his musical chops in Extremely Unique Dynamic with “Taco Loving Asian Guy” and a too-catchy-for-its-own-good pop punk song that plays in the film’s third act. Xu too gets to dust off his non-acting talents with his many amusing attempts at marketing this movie within a movie within a movie…within a movie. Xu and Leung are a DIY-filmmaking dynamic duo who have created a film that is so easy to love.
heroic impact
A dizzying number of plots exist within Extremely Unique Dynamic, and viewers need a murder-investigation-esque wall complete with red string to make sense of what’s going on in all the movies that exist within the larger film. But does that matter? What’s at stake here is a decades-long friendship that’s about to fundamentally change; the fear and anxiety that come with losing proximity to such a special person. Extremely Unique Dynamic understands the bizarre mix of emotions that is a part of saying goodbye. There are a lot of tears, a lot of laughs, a lot of loneliness, and a little bit of drugs.
Extremely Unique Dynamic is one of the quietest stoner bromance movies. It’s not as slapstick-y as the works of Seth Rogen, but it has the absurdist heart of all the greats of the genre. Ryan and Danny have a million things they need to say to each other and a deadline to say them, so the task feels insurmountable. How do you say goodbye to someone you’ve known since elementary school? How can you quit your dreams? Should you? Beneath its goofy meta-humor is the sensitive underbelly of insecurity. By the end of Extremely Unique Dynamic, the audience will have two new best friends, making it even harder to say goodbye as the credits roll.