Disturbing Behavior

First, let me say a few words to you on behalf of the guy in the row behind me at this Q-101 (read: teeny bop alternative) about this movie:

"Dude, fuckin' dude, man, fuckin', Duuuuuuude!!!"

Given the multiple interpretations of the word "Dude," I realize that that is a rather ambiguous statement. So let's move on.

Remember that group of kids in high school that had all their homework done on time, organized bake sales and car washes when they weren't at cheerleading or football practice? Weren't you convinced that they were not quite right in the head? Well, guess what? They weren't, if they were anything like the kids in Cradle Bay.

The story centers around a family who relocates from Chicago to the warm fuzzy community of Cradle Bay after one of the children dies. The surviving kids are a little angry and mixed up, the parents don't know how to talk to them. Typical. Cradle Bay is supposed to be a fresh start for all of them. If they had any idea...

The first person our protagonist Steve (Superhunk in the making James Marsden, who clearly finished high school a long time ago) befriends is this stoner underachiever Gavin (Nick Stahl, who's like the better looking brother of one of the members of Supergrass, and yes, I know that reference is lost on most of you), who shows Steve the class system at this school. This has been done before, notably in The Breakfast Club: Jocks, nerds, outcasts, vocational grease monkeys, but the way these groups are introduced, while clearly the words of a screenwriter, I thought was pretty funny.

The last group Gavin shows Steve is the Blue Ribbons, who all wear letterman sweaters and football jackets, study together, excel in school and in extracurricular activities, and will have absolutely nothing to do with anyone outside their group. And despite the way they treat other people, the Blue Ribbon group is getting bigger. Gavin senses there is evil lurking underneath those cornfed steroid stuffed torsos. Everyone else thinks he's paranoid. But when one of the kids who scuffles with a Blue Ribbon comes to school the next day as a Blue Ribbon, Steve, Gavin, and his friend Rachel (Dawson's Creek cutie Katie Holmes, who actually looks her character's age, how odd) start to get suspicious. And he has reason to be. These kids have all been planted with a chip that controls their thinking and turns them into "model" students. But the chip has a couple flaws, which I will not get into.

This movie was written by the very clever Scott Rosenberg, who is one of the most quotable screenwriters of the '90s (he also wrote Beautiful Girls and Con Air), and this movie has tons of good lines as well, if you can understand them. See, this movie's sound was mixed worse than any movie I've seen in years. I've always taken that aspect of movies for granted, but after seeing this, I understand its importance, especially when the dialogue is the best thing the movie has going for it.

David Nutter, a veteran X-Files and Milennium director, makes his feature debut here, and he does what he knows. This movie plays like an X-Files episode in many ways, with its quick edits and dark backdrops and silhouetting, but a lot of those ways are not good ways. Virtually every character and plot point is grossly underdeveloped. Some key pieces to the plot are glossed over in less than a minute. There are HUGE plot holes, gaps in logic, and the foreshadowing to the ending is way too obvious. I knew what was going to happen in the first ten minutes.

This was also the shortest movie I've seen, maybe ever. I'm guessing it was 80 minutes, which is short even by Disney cartoon standards. If they had fleshed out anything here, perhaps they could have had a truly sinister director's cut of the movie that still would run only an hour and 45 minutes. As it is, it seems some studio head came in and made Edward Scissorhands-type cuts to the director's finished product. I'm surprised this didn't wind up an Alan Smithee film (when a director is really unhappy with the finished product and asks to take his name off a movie, it becomes an Alan Smithee film).

Despite all of these flaws, I still enjoyed the movie. But I can't in good conscience recommend it to everyone. Willian Sadler (Die Hard 2, The Shawshank Redemption) made a nice turn as a janitor everyone thinks is an idiot, but the rest of the grownups were cookie cutter variety. For most people, I would recommend this as a rental when you have a little, and I mean a little, time to kill.