There’s a seductive fantasy at the center of “Destroy All Girls”: that you can skate fast enough to leave your old life behind. Alex runs from a grocery-store job, a combative mother, and the burden of caring for her paralyzed brother, trading it all for a van, a camera, and a crew of aspiring skateboarders chasing sponsorships across the country. The problem is that the film mistakes movement for momentum. Everyone is always going somewhere, but “Destroy All Girls” never figures out where—or why.
That uncertainty extends to the movie itself. Is it a pre-planned narrative disguised as a guerrilla documentary? Is it a scattershot collection of handheld footage assembled to suggest a story while maintaining an aura of near-anarchy—a middle finger to conventional filmmaking and the status quo? The problem isn’t that the film refuses easy categorization. It’s that its raw, unruly presentation never coheres into anything meaningful.
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Alex (Ani Mesa-Perez) lives in New York, works at a local grocery store, and helps care for her paralyzed brother alongside her combative mother. Resentment and exhaustion have clearly begun to wear her down. However, the film never digs deeply enough into the family dynamic to establish precisely what she wants beyond getting away from it.
Her escape arrives through a group of aspiring skateboarders documenting their lives in the abrasive, anything-goes style of Big Brother magazine and its infamous videos. Alex, an inline skater, soon abandons her job and family to join them on the road.
What follows should be a story about liberation, responsibility, and the intoxicating appeal of dropping out of ordinary life. Instead, “Destroy All Girls” drifts from one loosely connected encounter to another. Alex doesn’t appear particularly interested in becoming a professional skater herself. She seems content to help her new friends chase sponsorships, improve their videos, and pursue the vague dream of turning their nomadic lifestyle into something sustainable.
Along the way, Alex becomes romantically involved with one member of the group, a man who has a child with a woman he repeatedly speaks to off-camera. The relationship gives Alex another reason to remain with the crew, but it never develops enough emotional weight to explain her growing attachment to him or the life he represents. A potentially significant connection between Alex’s family history and the skateboarding community is also introduced, only to be brushed aside almost immediately.
Eventually, the group encounters an industry figure who believes their videos have potential and invites them to California. This should be the moment when their aimless adventure becomes something concrete, forcing Alex to decide whether she truly wants this life or has merely been running away from her old one.
The film barely capitalizes on it.
Instead, Alex begins to hesitate as her mother leaves increasingly frantic messages, unaware of her whereabouts and preparing to file a missing persons report. Her boss also repeatedly calls before apparently firing her over voicemail. These consequences accumulate, but “Destroy All Girls” never gives Alex’s guilt, anger, relief, or fear enough space to register. The audience is left to infer an internal conflict the film has failed to dramatize.
The apparent lesson is that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, but countless films have explored that idea with greater emotional and narrative precision. “Destroy All Girls” never provides a persuasive understanding of Alex’s motivations beyond her general unhappiness. She may be escaping the burden of caring for her brother, rebelling against her mother, searching for companionship, or simply seizing the first available opportunity to disappear. The film gestures toward all of these possibilities without committing to any of them.
Visually, the movie maintains the same handheld, grainy aesthetic throughout its runtime. During the skating sequences, that approach provides an appropriate immediacy, placing the audience inside the group’s restless world. Elsewhere, it often resembles conventional footage with an aggressively degraded filter laid over it.
There are moments when “Destroy All Girls” genuinely captures the texture of a documentary, and the performances are natural enough to support its fly-on-the-wall presentation. Mesa-Perez, in particular, possesses an understated screen presence that fits Alex’s guarded personality. But rawness isn’t automatically authenticity, and looseness isn’t a substitute for structure. Too many scenes feel like footage waiting to be shaped into a movie that never emerged in the editing room.
That is what makes “Destroy All Girls” so frustrating. It contains the pieces of a potentially compelling story: a young woman suffocating under familial responsibility, an alluring outsider community, the economic desperation beneath skate culture, and the complicated difference between freedom and abandonment. The film touches each of these ideas and then moves along before any of them can take hold.
There isn’t enough narrative momentum, psychological insight, or visual imagination to warrant a second viewing. The only thing “Destroy All Girls” reliably destroys is any desire to watch it again. [D+]
Brian Farvour is a film/television critic and entertainment journalist whose work has also appeared on Fandomwire. He previously co-hosted The Playlist Podcast.
