Over on my personal Facebook account, I did this meme that was the 30 day movie challenge. However, at Day 31, I kept going, with various friends and relatives naming categories to cover. One was “movie I use to play 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” and it was one of the few I named for a movie I have never seen. See, I have a friend who used to hang out with actress Sarah Michelle Geller, who was in I Know What You Did Last Summer with Jennifer Love Hewitt, who was on Party of Five with Neve Campbell, who was in Wild Things with Kevin Bacon.
But I’d never actually seen Wild Things, so I decided to fix that.
As it is, I sort of knew this movie mostly by reputation for two things. I knew, from the ads, that characters played by Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, and Denise Richards would engage in threeway sex, and I had heard the movie had full frontal male nudity, and that just about never happens. There was a plot that supposedly very complex and that was about all I knew.
However, the plot seemed, at first, to not be fill of many surprises. Set in Florida, popular high school teacher and guidance counselor Sam Lombardo (Dillon) is accused by wealthy student Kelly Van Ryan (Richards) of rape. Her parents sue, he gets arrested, beaten up, and another girl, this one from a trailer park named Susie Toller (Campbell), steps in with a second accusation, but it all falls apart in court under questioning from Sam’s attorney (Bill Murray). But then it seems as if Sam and the girls were in cahoots to get a hold of a large sum from Kelly’s parents to be split three ways. Except that at least one cop, Sgt. Ray Duquette (Bacon), is a bit wise to their scheme and decides, one way or the other, to reveal the truth to the public.
So, really, this seemed pretty straightforward. Duquette would make some moves, shaking the confidence of Susie or Kelly and mostly pissing off Ray and Duquette’s own superiors. I didn’t see why anyone would find it particularly confusing as it was rather by-the-numbers in many ways, a potential noir with a high amount of sexual energy to it (not that I found the sex in it all that steamy since, aside from the well-advertised threeway that only lasted a minute or so, there wasn’t much to it you’d need to block on commercial TV as it was). Then, in the last twenty minutes…stuff happens.
It’s not exactly incomprehensible or anything, but it is an attempt, late in the movie, to throw some Hail Marys and make the movie something a bit more memorable. And while a series of cut scenes show how these late movie plot twists actually do more or less work, the end result isn’t really making the movie any better. I didn’t find any of the characters all that compelling, I never thought there was an “aw cool!” plot twist, and the only actor’s performance I really dug was Murray in the closest the movie has to a comedic role, and he was basically just doing what he does all the time.
Yeah, for all the movie’s at-the-time reputation for having a lot of plot twists and such, the end result is still a so-so movie. I never much cared what happened to anyone, and aside from some artsy shots of a wine bottle appearing to bludgeon someone to death, there wasn’t anything to this movie I found particularly interesting or cool. It was just so average.
Grade: C
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