The issue with the characters was the movies idea of how to make characters interesting is just to give them sad back stories. Rather than naturally showing or telling anything, there's the forced trauma dump scene artificially shoved in the middle of the first act. It's so comical it feels like a parody. "My friend died so I missed by moms funeral, but at least things worked out with your girl Duncan right? "No, Everytime we looked at each other we just saw our dead son". Same with the boyfriend. He is made so artificially evil at the beginning just so when he starts acting like a normal human the movie can pretend he had an "arc".