Went to Coney Island on a Mission from God…Be Back by Five Movie Review

The cast is good, but the story leads nowhere. The narrative goes back and forth and forth and back, in quest of a friend (Rafael Baez as Richie) and the meaning of the friendship he shared with the two men who are looking for him (Jon Cryer as Daniel and Rick Stear as Stan). The friends encounter distractions along the way, but both the distractions and the back story are like road scenery glimpsed from a car window. The events mean something to the people who are living them, but nothing to the strangers who observe them. Went to Coney Island might have meant more if the incidents in the screenplay by Cryer and Richard Schenkman had been selected with greater care and developed with more oomph. Cryer and Schenkman, who previously collaborated on The Pompatus of Love, co-produced the film, which played at San Francisco's Indie Fest in 1999.

1998 94m/C Jon Cryer, Rick Stear, Rafael Baez, Ione Skye, Frank Whaley, Peter Gerety, Akili Prince, Aesha Waks, Dominic Chianese; D: Richard Schenkman; W: Richard Schenkman, Jon Cryer; C: Adam Beekman; M: Midge Ure.