Paper Towns (2015) Directed by Jake Schreier. Starring: Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, Austin Abrams. IMDB says: “A young man and his friends embark upon the road trip of their lives to find the missing girl next door.”

My only connection to Paper Towns before seeing the film was the source material’s author John Green who also wrote the fan favorite cancer drama The Fault in Our Stars. I thought TFIOS was a fine effort and enjoyed the film more than I expected. When the trailer for Towns debuted I was excited to hear Green’s work adapted once again, this time wrapped up in a seemingly lighter mystery. Like Stars, Towns succeeds at teaching viewers important lessons about young adult life but ultimately fails to become a memorable cinematic experience.

Our protagonist Quentin is enamored with the mysterious girl next door Margo. The two were pals when they were younger because they were the same age, lived close to each other and as Q describes it “no other reason I could ever think of.” They grow apart as they get older until one night Margo spontaneously recruits Q to help her enact a daring “revenge plot” on her ex-boyfriend and former friends. After sharing a night of thrilling adventure, the mystery loving Margo vanishes leaving Q in the dust. Together with his two best friends, he attempts to piece together where Margo went and hopefully find her.

Despite the premise, Paper Towns is far more of a road movie than a mystery as it doesn’t take the group too long before finding a viable place for Margo’s whereabouts. Caught up in the excitement of the adventure, the group makes a spur of the moment decision to track down Q’s “love.” Like most road trip movies this is more about the journey and not the destination, something our main character fails to realize right away even with not one but two Captain Ahab/Moby Dick reference. It might sound like this is a very familiar story and one too cute to fully believe but the endgame for Towns smartly subverts that idea. Unfortunately, the subversion I’m referring to was sort of spoiled for me going into the film so I won’t say more on the subject for the benefit of future moviegoers.

Sidestepping the film’s message, Paper Towns has little in the way of excitement. The characters are likeable but uninteresting and almost everything else wrong with the movie follows the same doomed path. Performances are serviceable save for the lead Nat Wolff who I thought gave a nuanced performance to his sadly lacking role. I liked the soundtrack but don’t remember it. The direction was nice enough but unremarkable. Everything just sort of exists in the movie and doesn’t connect. It may play better to the target demo but I felt underwhelmed by most of the experience.

It’s shame I wasn’t more moved by the story because I felt like it was trying to say something worthy that isn’t touched on nearly enough in the medium. My one huge takeaway was that I could imagine the whole thing playing much better as a book. Overall, there is nothing too cinematic about the journey and as a result I found myself a bit joyless during scenes where the character we’re having a blast. It didn’t feel like I was having fun with them but watching from a very distant place.