Cruel Intentions, review: It’s not even fun to hate-watch

This remake of the 1999 Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe satirical teen movie will just leave you cringing

1/5

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It was testament to the talents of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe that, after watching Cruel Intentions (1999), you were left yearning for their glossy locks and blue-blooded good looks rather than wondering, say, why you were watching a budding romance between two siblings.
Okay, they were only step siblings, but borderline incest was only one part of Cruel Intention’s shocking lineup of depravity: Geller’s Kathryn strolling around her ivy-covered private school with a cross necklace filled with cocaine; blackmail and sexual deviancy exercised casually by school-age teenagers; the siblings’ bet that they could “deflower” the innocent Annette (Reese Witherspoon).
Now emblazoned with the “cult classic” badge of honour, the film – a loose adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses – has already spawned a hit spin-off musical. And because Hollywood doesn’t seem to be capable of making anything original these days, it was only a matter of time before Cruel Intentions was glossily remade for TV.
So here we have Amazon’s Prime Video’s dire new eight-parter, which turns Kathryn into Caroline (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Phillipe’s Sebastian into Lucien (Zac Burgess) and swaps the prep-school setting for an elite American university campus where sororities and fraternities reign supreme. It’s a clever idea, if only Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens or Mindy Kaling’s The Sex Lives of College Girls hadn’t done it already, and much better.
The original film positively brimmed over with sex and intrigue; cheesy dialogue and far-fetched plots became no issue up against Gellar and Phillippe’s chemistry. You left that film wishing you were them, tragedy and daddy issues aside. In Amazon’s series, however, you’re just left cringing. A core plot about a fraternity hazing gone wrong, which results in a powerful Congressman’s son (Khobe Clarke) being brain damaged, feels half-soaked, while the relationship between the main siblings plays as icky rather than sexually-charged.
Witherspoon’s character is turned into Savannah Lee Smith’s (best known for HBO’s similarly dismal Gossip Girl reboot) Annie Grover, the confident daughter of the US Vice-President, a transformation which straight away renders the battle of wits between her, Caroline and Lucien obsolete. She has more power than they do, and even Lucien’s come-hither winks and stares can’t crack that shell.
The main issue is that Hook is no Gellar – the latter’s Kathryn was sick, twisted, and sociopathic, but she was magnetic. It’s nothing to do with beauty; Kathryn had the allure and chemistry necessary to make you overlook the psycho-machinations and vouch for her. Caroline, on the other hand, is just an old-school mean girl, written with zero flair or depth. The only actor who seems to have done their homework is John Harlan Kim, who plays a wickedly unpredictable fraternity president with blurred sexual preferences and no morals to speak of. The majority of the show merely veers into pastiche, as the cast desperately churn out their impersonations of their superior predecessors.
And the less said about the soundtrack, the better. I thought the acoustic spin on The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony – so memorable in the original film – was bad enough, but I have lived through enough cloying John Lewis adverts to know people’s tastes can’t be trusted. But then came a choir girl-esque version of Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl, and even hate-watching the show became impossible.
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3/5