TheGiantClaw’s review published on Letterboxd:
Glory Daze is one of those movies you'd find in a time capsule of films of that summed up nineties cinema fifty years from now, along side Singles and Reality Bites. The nineties were littered with teen angst movies, and while some rose above the rest, Glory Daze just floats among the other forgotten teen angst films of the time not doing or saying much.
Writer/director Rich Wilkes has had experience in youth culture film making with his previous writing endeavors Airheads and The Stoned Age, and as far as his directorial debut about the after college blues goes, well, it's certainly better than St. Elmo's Fire. The characters are stock but they aren't loathsome. They actually feel more three dimensional because their struggles and reactions feel more realistic. Yeah some of them are still assholes and they're all pretty much idiots, but it's justified here more than in St. Elmo's Fire because these characters actually earn these personas.
Now as I said the movie isn't perfect. It's definitely a product of its time. It doesn't show the struggles of the average young white American male any differently than Pump Up the Volume or SLC Punk did. It checks off every standard cliche of this type of movie; you've got relationship problems, booze, punk music and wrecking stuff. But at the end of the day it serves its purpose and has a good moral, and that's all I wanted out of this.
This movie doesn't induce rage like Say Anything or joy like with Pump Up the Volume, it sits in the middle for me. It's a able Netflix watch and nothing more to me, but I'm sure there are people who connect to this movie on an emotional level, and I can certainly understand that because there's a teen angst movie for us all, we just have to find it.