{"id":1118483,"date":"2026-07-29T17:31:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T17:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1118483\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T17:31:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T17:31:18","slug":"tony-movie-review-a-briny-anthony-bourdain-coming-of-age-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1118483\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Tony’ Movie Review: A Briny Anthony Bourdain Coming-of-Age Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The kind of thing its fake-it-till-you-make-it young hero would overconfidently refer to as a bildungs roman (sic), Matt Johnson\u2019s \u201cTony<\/a>\u201d is a briny and bittersweet coming-of-age movie<\/a> about an obnoxious kid so eager to be someone that he tries to skip over the hard work of becoming. Turns out it doesn\u2019t work like that \u2014\u00a0or at least it didn\u2019t used to.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That said kid will later grow up to be acclaimed chef, bestselling author, and iconic travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain<\/a> is almost completely irrelevant to the insouciant fun of watching this leather-jacketed leech bounce around Provincetown in the summer of 1975, where he\u2019s looking for anything but experience. Right now, he\u2019s just a 19-year-old Dominic Sessa<\/a> with an idea for an idea, some big words he doesn\u2019t fully understand, and a pair of nunchucks tucked away in his bellbottoms. Quoth Bourdain in the film<\/a>\u2019s opening title card: \u201cI was \u2014\u00a0to be frank \u2014\u00a0a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.\u201d In \u201cTony,\u201d which retains the sincere flavor of street meat despite being factory-processed within an inch of its life, he gets that ass-kicking hard and fast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"'Ha-Chan,<\/a> \"'Pinocchio:<\/a> <\/p>\n

The smartest aspect of the film\u2019s script \u2014 credited to Johnson, Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, and Matthew Miller \u2014 is how framing its lead as such an inveterate self-mythologizer allows \u201cTony\u201d to distance its version of Bourdain from the legend that he will ultimately become. \u201cNo Reservations\u201d neophytes are invited to take the character at face value, while those of us who\u2019ve spent hundreds of hours watching Bourdain eat his way across the Earth can savor how perfectly Sessa\u2019s embodiment mistakes the ingredients of his eventual success. Bourdain was a relaxed-casual ronin with a wandering spirit and a refined taste for the truth; Tony is an arrogant brat so desperate to be Holden Caulfield that he forgets Holden Caulfield was defined by wanting to be Anthony Bourdain.<\/p>\n

Tony\u2019s One Magical Summer begins with the delusional conviction that he\u2019ll be awarded a writing grant for some bullshit he pitched about J.D. Salinger. \u201cA lot\u2019s changed since high school,\u201d he tells \u2014\u00a0not shows \u2014 a pretty, unimpressed classmate (Emilia Jones as Nancy) after bumping into her at a bar one night. \u201cThe truth is that I\u2019m about to get this huge fellowship.\u201d Actually, the truth is that the committee is about to pick a much worthier candidate for the cash, and that Tony, having also lied to his parents about winning the prize, is going to follow Nancy up to Provincetown in lieu of any better ideas.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It turns out there are some minor problems with that plan. For one thing, Nancy is already spoken for so far as summer-long situationships are concerned (she\u2019s fucking someone who\u2019s only defined as \u201ca pizza delivery guy with a big dick\u201d). For another, Tony is only in town for a few hours before he gets drunk on cheap beer, pisses off the entire staff of the only half-decent restaurant in town, and gets robbed of the last few dollars in his wallet by the kitchen worker who volunteers to throw him out of The Flagship head-first. That isn\u2019t enough to humble our black-eyed lout, but spending a few months as a dishwasher at The Flagship in exchange for getting to sleep on the head chef\u2019s hammock soon will.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gently washed in the \u201chow were we ever so young?\u201d nostalgia of a summer that its namesake won\u2019t come to appreciate until he starts writing that part of his memoir, Johnson\u2019s film offsets the halcyon sentimentality of its tone and structure by surrounding Tony with the saltiest people he\u2019s ever met. That\u2019s a low bar to clear in regard to an upper-middle-class Vassar freshman who\u2019s obviously petrified of his mommy (Dagmara Domi\u0144czyk), but sharing a kitchen with a guy like Sal would be an education for any booksmart college boy who thinks he\u2019s got the world all figured out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pure id in a restaurant full of half-formed egos, Sal \u2014 played by \u201cTuner\u201d star Leo Woodall in the best performance of his young career \u2014 is an ultra-charismatic Masshole who devours every moment of his life as if it\u2019s his last meal. He\u2019ll fight or fuck or fuck you over at the drop of a hat because that\u2019s what\u2019s in front of him, and he\u2019ll do it with all the emotion of someone chewing their food. This is all Sal will ever be, and an aspirant someone like Tony can\u2019t help but love him for it, even if Sal would probably set fire to the Flagship just to watch it burn. This movie is incandescent every minute that he\u2019s in it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"\u2018Tony\u2019<\/p>\n

Stavros Halkias, Michael Jibrin, and Monica Raymund help round out the kitchen staff with a jocular, blue-collar vibe that seems modeled after the crew of the Nostromo (if you\u2019ll forgive the anachronism), while the otherwise unidentified Chef rules over the restaurant with a quiet sense of respect \u2014\u00a0not only for his employees, but for the sacred task of serving fish and chips to people who can afford summer homes on the Cape. A Portuguese immigrant whose squinty demeanor and monastic lifestyle belie how transparently he longs to mentor an impudent kid like Tony, Chef is a role that would have rang false if not for how Antonio Banderas\u2019 well-modulated performance refuses to let his role be reduced to its function in someone else\u2019s story. In his hands, Chef sees potential in Tony without ever reducing him to the chosen one; he thrills in molding the kid into shape, but Banderas \u2014 in tune with Johnson\u2019s allergy to anything that might resemble \u201cGood Will Hunting\u201d \u2014\u00a0gives Chef enough space to suggest that his life won\u2019t be defined by teaching a young Anthony Bourdain how to shuck an oyster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some other people in Tony\u2019s orbit aren\u2019t quite so lucky. Nancy is the worst offender, which is ironic given the enormous part she\u2019ll go on to play in Tony\u2019s life after this movie ends. Reduced to little more than a beautiful girl with a Minolta camera and a latent desire to photograph the real person hiding under Tony\u2019s see-through swagger, Nancy only exists so that he can have someone to lie to. Jones is unfailingly believable, but it\u2019s hard to be cast as human scaffolding, and Johnson \u2014 whose faux-documentary style has always encouraged him to avoid such plainly schematic characters \u2014\u00a0can\u2019t manufacture enough verisimilitude on a minute-by-minute basis to save Nancy from the obviousness of her overall purpose.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As much as the movie delights in churning Tony through the same coming-of-age tropes he\u2019s trying to skip right over, its beach-town energy and Brian Eno needle-drops are increasingly clouded by the looming inevitability that Nancy will learn about Tony\u2019s deception. That\u2019s only made worse by the fact that it\u2019s treated as some kind of grand betrayal rather than an impulsive act of youthful stupidity that will make for a good story one day. By that point, it doesn\u2019t register as much of a surprise that \u201cTony\u201d plays into expectations where any of Johnson\u2019s previous films would have zagged in the other direction, as this is by some measure the most conventional thing the \u201cBlackBerry\u201d director has ever made (to the point that it almost feels like an experiment to see what might happen if one of his irrepressible motor-mouths was trapped inside the dimensions of a Polaroid). Zooms are out, and super long lenses are in, as Johnson \u2014 trusting in the magic of Sessa\u2019s wholly self-possessed lead performance \u2014\u00a0chooses to de-emphasize Tony\u2019s subjectivity in favor of playing up genre form.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That gamble pays off for the most part. Johnson recognizes how this, at heart, is a coming-of-age story about a rising star who\u2019s learning to be unburdened by a future that\u2019s better than he could ever imagine \u2014 a kid who\u2019s learning that no one can become the person they pretend to be without being the person they actually are along the way. \u201cTony\u201d struggles for an ending, but it doesn\u2019t really need one; the real fun here lies in paving the way to parts unknown.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grade: B<\/p>\n

A24<\/a> will release \u201cTony\u201d in theaters on Friday, August 7.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The kind of thing its fake-it-till-you-make-it young hero would overconfidently refer to as a bildungs roman (sic), Matt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1118484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3935],"tags":[21211,77,3063,3943,6082,78204,16,15],"class_list":["post-1118483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-a24","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-tony","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117004462443507867","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1118483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1118484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1118483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1118483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1118483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}