After the critical success of 2014’s Oscar-nominated Boyhood, 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!! returns filmmaker Richard Linklater to his roots. In the same vein as 1993’s Dazed and Confused, Wants offers a semi-autobiographical look at the director’s youth.

In 1980, talented athlete Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner) begins his freshman year at Southwest Texas University, where he’ll pitch for the baseball team. He moves into the house shared by most of the players and gets to know these guys – for better or for worse.

Along with Jake’s teammate bonding, he meets a pretty co-ed named Beverly (Zoey Deutch). As Jake acclimates to school and the rigors of big-time college baseball, he also pursues a nascent relationship with Beverly.

Though somewhat hyped as a sequel to Dazed and Confused, Wants doesn’t really fit that bill. The two films boast common factors – Linklater, Texas settings, sports, etc. – but they involve no shared characters, so Wants never attempts to continue the story told in Dazed.

This means I regard Wants as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed. Along with the shared elements I mentioned above, both films also come light on plot points and heavy on “slice of life” episodes with an emphasis on character interactions.

For Dazed, this worked very well. In essence a 1970s riff on American Graffiti, Linklater’s 1993 film gave us a lot of charm and entertainment.

Unfortunately, those factors largely go missing in the slow and tedious Wants. Whereas Graffiti seemed to be the main influence for Dazed, Wants reflects a different iconic 1970s movie: Animal House. Though not as outrageous as the John Belushi classic, Wants goes for a party-oriented wild-and-crazy vibe much of the time that shows clear echoes of Animal House.

This doesn’t work, as Linklater simply isn’t the right director for that kind of movie. Linklater could take the script of Graffiti and make a good film out of it, but given the text for Animal House, he’d flop – it’s just not the kind of tale in his wheelhouse.

Wants suffers from its aimlessness as well. Perhaps the success of the largely narrative-free Boyhood went to Linklater’s head and he figured he could make a movie with one-dimensional characters and no plot succeed, but he can’t – at least not in this case.

I don’t want to overstate the case and make Wants out to be a complete snoozer. It occasionally shows signs of life, and though I was 13 in 1980 and still five years away from college, it awakens a decent sense of nostalgia in me.

Unfortunately, the movie just boasts little forward momentum. Linklater seems so hung up on various bits and pieces of daily life that he forgets to make anything interesting out of them.

A dull lead actor doesn’t help. Jenner lacks any obvious charisma and creates a void at the head of the film. With a near-total absence of personality at work, it becomes tough to focus on Jake – or to care about him.

The rest of the cast shows a bizarre melange of performances and traits. Some of the actors go for a natural approach while others ham it up but good. In particular, Juston Street’s turn as hyped pitching prospect Jay Niles seems out of an entirely different – and way more slapstick – movie. Niles would fit in a Police Academy movie better than he does here.

If you can accept the film’s aimless pace and lack of character introspection, you might get something out of it. Whatever pleasures emerge from Wants remain modest, though. Fans who hope for a return to the glories of Dazed and Confused will encounter disappointment.

Footnote: stick around through the end credits for a quirky music video.

Everybody Wants Some!! appears in an aspect ratio of approximately 1.85:1 on this Blu-Ray Disc. This was a consistently positive presentation.

Sharpness looked solid. Only minimal softness ever crept into the occasional wide shot, so the movie usually seemed concise and accurate. Jagged edges and moiré effects failed to appear, and edge haloes remained absent. Print flaws also stayed away from this clean image.

In terms of palette, Wants went with a mildly stylized palette. Much of the film opted for a light amber tone, but other tints appeared as well, and the colors were well-rendered. Blacks showed good depth, and shadows looked smooth. I felt pleased with the image.

As for the film’s DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack, it worked pretty fine for the story. The audio tended to be somewhat restrained most of the time, but some sequences – such as those at clubs or on the street – opened up the spectrum in a satisfying manner. Music offered the dominant element, as the omnipresent songs spread around the speakers.

Audio quality was perfectly acceptable. Speech showed nice clarity and naturalism, and music was distinctive and dynamic. Effects lacked much to stand out, but they appeared accurate, and they showed mild punch when necessary. All of this seemed good enough for a “B-“.

As we head to the set’s extras, we start with four featurettes. Rickipedia runs three minutes, 57 seconds and features writer/director Richard Linklater and actors Justin Amelio, Juston Street, Glen Powell, Forrest Vickery, J. Quinton Johnson, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Will Brittain, Tanner Kalina and Blake Jenner. The clip looks at Linklater’s memory for period-specific details. It’s mildly interesting.

During the six-minute, 42-second Baseball Players Can Dance, we hear from Brittain, Amelio, Street, Linklater, Powell, Vickery, Jenner, Johnson, choreographer Andrea Ariel, assistant choreographer Samantha Weidhaas, and actor Temple Baker. This piece looks at how the actors learned how to dance for the movie. We find a mix of decent insights.

Skills Videos lasts five minutes, 17 seconds and features Amelio, Street, Baker, Brittain, Guzman, Hoechlin, Vickery, Kalina, Johnson, and actor Wyatt Russell. Here we see parts of try-out videos the actors made to show their baseball abilities. These prove to be fun to see, though the production choice to add fake scan lines makes them uglier than they should be.

Finally, History 101: Stylin’ the 80s lasts four minutes, 20 seconds. It features Street, Powell, Vickery, Johnson, Guzman, Johnson, Hoechlin, Brittain, Kalina, Russell, and Amelio. The short tells us a little about efforts to bring period realism to the film. Like its predecessors, it works reasonably well.

Called More Stuff That’s Not In the Movie, a collection of outtakes fills 25 minutes, 24 seconds. Most of this compilation provides short deleted scenes that emphasize character bits. No new story elements emerge, so we find a lot of random moments. Some bloopers show up as well. Fans of the movie will enjoy these lost snippets, but none of them stand out as especially memorable to me.

A second disc provides a DVD copy of Wants. It lacks any of the Blu-ray’s extras.

With its throwback to Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! shows promise. Unfortunately, the movie seems too random and rambling to offer more than sporadic entertainment. The Blu-ray provides solid picture along with adequate audio and a handful of supplements. Wants becomes a forgettable work.