04/16/10 - Cruel Intentions

Cruel Intentions (1999, 97 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139134/

This was always one of those movies that as a teen I'd been interested in. I think the reasons for this are obvious. Anyway, I finally decide to check it, even though I'm not a teen anymore.

The film stars a group of high school students living in New York City. During the summer, relationships form and enemies are made by the group. The four main stars are: Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe), Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon), and Cecile Caldwell (Selma Blair).

I can sum up this review with one word: terrible. You can probably already guess the rating. However, I'll still provide a few notes on why it deserves that score. The real reasons here are that everyone is stupid and nothing makes sense. This is a lethal combination in the movies which usually results in the film being abysmal. The reason nothing makes sense is because the story was clearly adapted from a more adult setting and they just threw it into the high school setting. So this results in these high school kids essentially living in a land with no laws or rules of any sort. They have "reputations" and the like but there doesn't seem to be anything they can do that can get them in trouble in any way. I half expected someone to just start shooting people and them get away with it with no explanation. In a movie where the world doesn't seem to have any rules whatsoever, I usually lose interest really quickly.

The next point I complained about is pretty much just tied in with the first. Because of this "no rule" landscape, the characters are free to do whatever they want. And they just end up doing stupider and stupider things. For one, the characters do seem "smart" in the way of conniving and doing deals behind each other's backs. But this "smartness" obviously doesn't translate into simple common sense as each character is moronic in this department. Partly stemming from the fact that they face no consequences from their actions aside from their small clique, they act without limits and it just ends up being the completely wrong thing to do half the time.

Overall, I gave this film a 1/10. The characters are stupid. They do stupid things. And the whole world is stupid. None of the characters are memorable. None of the characters are likable. I wanted a bomb or something to go off in New York City and somehow only kill the individuals in this film. It was that bad. I will even go so far as to say it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.