Rating : 3/5
Reviewed by Adam
Cruel Intentions was a teen movie made with a WB cast.
However, it's characterizations were admirable. Each character
operated from certain premises, and held certain convictions.
Accordingly, they acted on those convictions, and reached the logical
end each time. The young woman who used popular opinion as her
bludgeon while trying to indulge herself at every turn and keep a clean
appearance ends up falling to the forces that she used - as in the end,
force always destroys itself. The player - Ryan Phillippe - had an
impeccable style which was artistic in itself. He operated from
certain premises, and got, in the end, everything that he deserved.
And the faith-moralist (unfortunately the most shoddily constructed
character in the movie) ends up realizing some of the results of her
evasions. The movie is of mixed effectiveness on this point: it offers
the alternative of debauchery or a ridiculous antirational moral
commandment system, and manages to ignore som!
e crucial points of the identity of the faith system in presenting it
as the winner. In short, the movie offers a plausible ending, stemming
mostly from identity. To a much more satisfying degree, all the
important characters get exactly what they deserve. This rare feat
makes the movie more than worth watching; an example of actors playing
complete and realistic characters.
Rating : 3/5
Reviewed by Corey
Despite misgivings about the movie plot, (which at first
looked like merely a sex flick) Cruel Intentions is a movie in the
Romanticist tradition. The characters are the most delicious part;
they are "larger than life," and speak poetically. The writing isn't
bad either: Phillips is a remarkably real "double actor." Throughout
the movie he plays with the other characters by acting as a
goody-goody, making for interesting scenes. In the end, even though
every character has a (somewhat obvious) set of convictions that they
ae consistent with, the author kills a main character and has the
representative of the mystics as the heroine. She is a changed person,
but still on the other axis of the two polls the movie unfortunately
presents between holier-than-thou and backalley-trash.
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