Revenge is a dish best served with boba tea and avocado toast, amIright, hipsters? I suppose if you wanted to make a Hitchcock film with neither style nor substance and set it to the cut throat world of high school social life, this would be the way to do it.
Drea (Camila Mendes) has been wronged. She used to go steady (is “going steady” still a thing?) with a very popular boy named Max (Austin Abrams), but that is sooooo last season. Wait, Max is the name of a popular boy? That can’t be right. Even in this generation, that can’t be right, can it? Well, I’ll be silver hammered. They were the hot couple at Rosehill Country Day High School (that can’t possibly be right, either, can it?) until Max released a sex tape of Drea … which he denies.
Well, gosh, I just have a huge problem with this right off the bat… your woman is awesome enough to send you a sex tape and you make it public?! Who does that? Max, the BOY, is, of course, able to successfully plead innocence while Drea, the GIRL, is ruined. Ah, some things do never change.
Now, I know what you’re thinking … hasn’t everyone in Generation Z released a sex tape at some point? That is a gross untruth. Upwards of 12% (perhaps even more!) of Generation Z has never showed themselves nude on film. I’m sorry. Those are the facts and you have to accept them.
Meanwhile, Eleanor (the pedigreed Maya Hawke) also has somebody she’d like to shove into moving traffic. So, Drea and Eleanor form an uncomfortable friendship and decide to take it to the next level by plotting the downfall of their enemies. This is done Strangers on a Train style all the way from swapping their targets to the one person being more into the Do Revenge theme than the other.
This isn’t a film where you like characters. It’s kind of a film where you dislike some more than others, so they deserve
more comeuppance, right? I daresay this is a schadenfreude film. Despite the obvious Germanic origin of the word, schadenfreude couldn’t be a more American concept these days. Heck, we just had an entire presidency devoted to leadership by schadenfreude; half the people in this country live to enjoy somebody else in pain. The problem is that schadenfreude is, well, kinda evil, and not a great movie theme (although superior to a political one). Who wants to tell everybody that schadenfreude is good for about 30 seconds and then you should feel a little bit bad about reveling in somebody else’s misfortune … even if they have it comin’?
We are a long way from Heathers … and have you seen Heathers lately? I’m not sure it has aged well. I guess the better comparison is Mean Girls, but Do Revenge is gonna fail there as well. So while it’s not quite up to classic tales of teen social pariahdom, perhaps we can enjoy just knowing that somewhere out there teenagers are still teenagers. They have cliques; they hold grudges; they compete … just like the rest of us. That Rebel Wilson “teen” “comedy” Senior Year seemed to imply that the new generation of sub-adults are shared a communal vibe and PC mindset. That’s not right. Evolution doesn’t work that fast. As for Do Revenge … well, it was worth getting to the end, but I cannot say anything of greater value about the picture … and I’m not going to revel in its relative misfortune as an unsuccessful feature film.
High school panic and many Girls, Mean
Is better or worse for somebody to be seen?
Ain’t nobody pure
But of this, I am sure
When all is done, it still sucks to be teen
Rated TV-MA, 118 Minutes
Director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Writer: Celeste Ballard, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Genre: Generationally descriptive misfires (as in attempts to describe a generation that have misfired)
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Teenage girls desperately in search of a relevant anthem
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Rival generations
