What He Needs To Fix...
4. He Can Be A Bit Repetitive
Now you might be saying: "Oh, Nicholas, now you're contradicting yourself! You said setups and payoffs are the sign of a great filmmaker!" You know what, you're not wrong, dear reader. It is a bit of a contradiction, but I believe there is a distinction between using setups and payoffs effectively and being redundant. To put it in simple terms: If you have 1000 unique setups and payoffs that you perform only once each, you have a great movie. If you have 10 unique setups and payoffs that you repeat 100 times, you have a repetitive movie. Don Jon comes dangerously close to falling into redundancy. While all those callbacks I mention earlier are the calling card of a great directing mind, JGL has a tendency to use the same callbacks so frequently that they begin to lose their impact. So it's terrific that he thinks in terms of setups and payoffs, now he just needs to hone that skill and pick his spots more discriminately.