Review:

Before Sunrise is a hundred minutes of a man and a woman talking to each other. There is really no other plot; they just walk around Vienna together and chat. The acting is fine and there is some cool cinematography sometimes, but the rest is a bore. I can't even get into their relationship, because it does not feel like a conversation; it feels like two people alternating giving monologues. Ethan Hawke will say some philosophical bullshit or a boring story from his life and then Julie Delpy responds with her own speech about philosophy or her childhood. They have okay chemistry, but nothing else feels real. I was begging for something to happen or for them to broach something interesting or substantial, but they never do. I don't even get a real sense of their relationship developing, as topics aren't consistently digging deeper and neither character is really likable or relatable. There were a handful of times that they talked about something that caught my attention, but then Hawke will quickly offer a story about being 12 and they lose me again. I've not seen the other two Before films, so I can only view this as an individual experience and my experience had me skipping back thirty minutes because I fell asleep. It's not a RomCom and it's not a drama; it's like two high school seniors playing grown up giving monologues.