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| Directed by Roger Kumble; Starring Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Reese Witherspoon, Selma Blaire, Christine Baranski, and Swoozie Kurtz |
In a modern day retelling of the French play Les Liaisons Dangereuses aka Dangerous Liasons, Screenwriter/Director Roger Kumble reminds me of why classic pieces of writing are poorly modernized (see William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and Great Expectations with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneyth Paltrow). I Know What You Did Last Summer and 54 star Phillippe plays his normal hormone-crazed character. The only difference is that in this film he is a supposed genius despite the fact that he lacks the thinking skills to successfully enunciate sentences. He is playing the part of Sebastian Valmont, the John Malkovich role in DL. Sebastian is a wealthy Manhattan socialite that spends his spare time grabbing girls to suit his sexual needs for the moment. Enter his wicked step-sister, a vamp straight from the Glenn Close portrayal in DL. Sarah Michelle Gellar whose previous works have included the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Simply Irresistible turns out well cast for the role, especially masked behind dyed black hair. Her Kathryn is both appealing and unappealing at the same time. She also gets kudos along with Selma Blaire for well pulling of a lesbian kiss scene without turning it into the normal Hollywood formula treatment.
The story follows Sebastian’s bet with Kathryn that he cannot get Annette, a young girl from Kansas that wrote a report for Seventeen Magazine about waiting for marriage. Played by the voluptuous Reese Witherspoon, Annette has a certain allure to her that makes her “manifesto” a little hard to swallow. Anyway, as formula goes, Sebastian actually falls in love with Annette despite the attempts by Kathryn to stop this from happening.
The film does put forth a better attempt than the down-right awful Romeo+Juliet, but all in all it lacks the potential to be sexy that it’s previews so tauted it to be. As master film critic Lisa Shwartzbaum put “Showing less skin than an average Lever 2000 soap commercial and making less orgasmic noise than promos for Clairol shampoos, these teenthrobs are merely playing at being studs and vamps.” And unfortunately that is the truth. Like the so-called “steamy-hot” Female Perversions and Wild Things, Cruel Intentions is the antithesis to what we might make if we wanted to be sexy filmmakers but did not want a R rating. In fact the films rating is completely based on it’s language. It had potential, especially after the kiss between Blair and Gellar but never makes up for what it acts like it was setting out to do.
On an ending note, the cast does give a good try at it (except for the never quite on the mark Phillippe) and Kumble makes some good directorial attempts but the screenplay bogs down a film that most would say needed no screenplay at all.
