Cruel Intentions: Love is a Battlefield

Reviewed by Vickie, Cinema Geek

Vick's Rating:

= There's two hours of my life I'll never see again. Is it too late to ask for my money back?
= They could have done SO much better. Wait for the video.
= Not bad at all. Some solid work.
= Wow! I'm very impressed. I might go see this one again.
= For the love of all that is good and kind in the world, what an amazing movie!!!

Directed by Roger Kumble

CAST:
Sebastian..............Ryan Phillippe
Kathryn.....Sarah Michelle Gellar
Annette..........Reese Witherspoon
Cecile........................Selma Blair
Ronald.........Sean Patrick Thomas
Blaine...................Joshua Jackson

You know, I'm really, really not a huge Sarah Michelle Gellar fan. So it was with some degree of reluctance that I actually found myself sitting in a theater to see her new movie, which is clearly hoping to capitalize on the devotion of the legion of Buffy the Vampire Slayerviewers to rake in the big bucks.

That's a good thing, since those same fans will likely be the ones to forgive a lot of the flaws in this somewhat uneven adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Directed by Roger Kumble, the film tells the story of wealthy, bored and malicious teenage stepsiblings Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe) and Kathryn (Gellar), who relish deriving pleasure from the misfortune of others...especially if it involves some kind of spirit-crushing or sexual conquest. Doe-eyed Sebastian hides his cruel intentions (!) under a charming-if-a-tad-smarmy grin and a suave demeanor. A heartbreaker at heart, he beds and discards women at an alarming rate, and has gained a nasty but well-earned reputation in the process. He's a bad boy and he doesn't care who knows it. Kathryn, meanwhile, plays the princess when the grown-ups are around, but slithers out of that skin as soon as the coast is clear, sniffing cocaine from a well-placed stash and writhing around on Sebastian's lap just to tease the poor, oversexed boy.

But I digress. On to the plot! Sebastian and Kathryn have a few things in common, not the least of which are extremely healthy sexual appetites and an intense distaste for being one-upped, beaten or otherwise put-down in some way. When Kathryn gets wind that her former beau, who unceremoniously dumped her, is seeing naive, virginal Cecile (Selma Blair) she sets out to right the wrong she's been dealt, in her own demented way--namely, making sure that Cecile is "deflowered" and that her reputation is adequately sullied in the process. She tries to enlist her stepbrother in her plan, but he has his own mission to deflower a virginal young thing of his own: straitlaced Kansas girl Annette (Reese Witherspoon), who wrote a "manifesto" in a national magazine declaring her stance on abstinence from sex, and who just happens to be the daughter of the new headmaster at Sebastian and Kathryn's private school. In Sebastian's eyes, it's the ultimate challenge and one he'll attack with every ounce of his stud-muffin know-how.

To make his task more interesting, he opts for some side-betting with his stepsister, who thinks he has about as much luck succeeding as Pauly Shore does of winning an Oscar. If she wins, and he's unsuccessful, she can have his fancy-schmancy roadster. But if he wins, and he beds Annette, he also gets a romp in the hay with Kathryn...who, one suspects, wouldn't be that unwilling in the first place.

And it's off to the races they go. Soon, other little secrets pop out that make the game more interesting for all the players involved, and there are quickly equal parts bedhopping and backstabbing going on. But poor Sebastian is having the hardest time of any of them, because for all his devious, womanizing ways, he finds himself actually falling for the girl he's aiming to destroy. Ah, the dilemmas of adolescence.

Yeah, well, it all sounds intriguing, but the film kind of bumbles along with entertaining moments meant to titillate its young audience (Ooh! Sarah Michelle Gellar kisses a girl! Look! Ryan Phillippe doesn't have any pants on!) sprinkled in between a whole lot of mediocrity. It bounces back and forth between over-the-top and legitimately dramatic, so that at times it's dificult to tell whether a scene is being played for laughs or is just being poorly executed. And I'm still not sure if the filmmakers were aiming for high camp (if so, they needed to crank it up a few more notches) or high drama (in which case, they should have turned it down a smidge). Either way, they weren't completely successful.

The cast of young actors, all plucked from the pages of teen magazines or GAP ads, is appealing and, to give them credit, they truly seem to be having fun with their roles. Ryan Phillippe struts across the screen with his ladykiller looks and boyish charm like an amiable young lion stalking his prey. He's rich, he knows what he's doing and he enjoys it. That message comes through loud and clear.

But so does the one that says that someone should have told Sarah Michelle Gellar that the part of Alexis Carrington has already been cast. She's like a bad Joan Collins wannabe here, with her flamboyant-but-not-altogether-flattering wardrobe and melodramatic line deliveries. My eyes hurt from all the rolling.

Reese Witherspoon was appropriately aloof but still somewhat sweet as the object of Sebastian's desire. A virgin with spunk, sex appeal and a brain. At the other end of the spectrum was Selma Blair, as the ditzy-beyond-belief Annette, who was so insipid and unbelievably moronic that her character became, well, insipid and unbelievably moronic. No one is that stupid, and I was totally distracted by the fact that she (Blair) was obviously a smart girl trying way too hard to act like a dumb one.

Joshua Jackson appears all too briefly as a gay teenager who opts to help Sebastian seek vengeance by outing the school's star football player. As a teen heartthrob you'd think he'd get a little more screen time, especially since his appearance on camera elicited hoots, hollers and cheers from the teenage girls in the theater with me.

So, what am I saying? Cruel Intentionshas its moments. Parts of the movie are quite entertaining. Other parts...not so much. It's uneven and occasionally muddled, making what could have been a wickedly wicked film into nothing more than an average movie.

Vickie, a self-confessed movie addict, has spent the last few years working at an entertainment magazine in Canada. When she's not toiling away at her computer in the office, she's toiling away at her computer at home-- hacking away at unfinished screenplays and planning her acceptance speech for the Academy Awards.