Hollywood has been making films based on true stories for decades now. It just depends on how much of the said true story they choose to use. Many times they use creative license to tell these stories. Skincare is one such story. It’s based on a real story, but it’s not entirely about all the facts that happened. Is it better for that? I don’t necessarily know that it is.

Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks) is an esthetician in Hollywood. She is about to launch her own line of skin care products when she notices a new salon across the alley from hers. Then things start to happen, such as nasty emails being sent to her client list, and other things that seem to indicate she is being cyber attacked.  Things start to get out of hand as vandalism and the authorities start to get involved and things start to get out of control.

Elizabeth Banks has been an actress who has done a lot of different things in her career. She’s been in action films, and comedies and even directed a few movies in her time. This film seemed at first glance like it was going to be right up her alley. The problem is this type of story has been done before and even better. She as the star is fine in the role. It’s a story that was written with a lot of creative license. That was the problem with the movie. It didn’t translate to screen all that well.

The cast of this movie has some good character actors, like Nathan Fillion who plays a television news anchor, Louis Gerardo Mendez, as the Shimmer salon owner, and Miheala Jae Rodriguez,  the truth-selling personal assistant to Banks’ character, but one in particular stood out to me. Lewis Pullman, the son of famous actor Bill Pullman. He’s coming off of an Emmy nomination for his role in the Apple TV original series Lessons in Chemistry where he was fantastic opposite Brie Larson. This role though was a step down for him in his career. He comes across as an idiot and not a good one if there is such a thing. I couldn’t stand him in this movie. He plays a life coach and that right there is a bunch of garbage to me. 

The combination of Sam Frrlich, Austin Peters, and Deering Regan wrote the screenplay for this movie. They took a real story and tried to make it more interesting by changing some of the facts of the story. The problem is they took away some of the authentic nature of the original story. The crazy aspects of the story seemed a little too far-fetched for my liking. Even though there have been a lot of crazy true stories depicted on the big screen and little, this one didn’t seem that good to me. Who knows, maybe others might like it. All films are subjective.

Skincare is just one of many movies lately based on a real person or product. This one combined the two because the product is part of the story, but it’s more about the person who created the product. I just found that the depiction of her story is not that interesting. Banks is good in the story as the main character. Pullman isn’t very good though and the story and depiction of the story didn’t do anything for me. The story aspects weren’t strong enough for me to be intrigued by the film. That’s too bad because I wanted to like it.

2 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen