The original Cruel Intentions movie, from 1999, was a camp masterpiece memorable for wonderfully nasty and vindictive performances by Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar as oversexed, amoral, rich-kid half-siblings. As a bonus, it captured Reese Witherspoon on the cusp of stardom, as the target of their skulduggery. But remove those factors and stretch this classroom-set remake of Dangerous Liaisons into an eight-part small-screen drama, and you excise all the fun. Joyless, ludicrous and dull: what a horrible thing they’ve done to Cruel Intentions (Prime Video).
In the film, Phillippe and Gellar’s characters placed a wager about corrupting Witherspoon’s wide-eyed newcomer to their elite high school. A major part of the appeal was the novelty of Gellar, aka adorable Buffy the Vampire Slayer, playing a villain. How transgressive. The modern equivalent would be to cast Zendaya as Doctor Who; people couldn’t get their heads around it.
A quarter of a century later the show has upgraded the setting to a preppy university outside Washington, DC. In so doing it demands that the viewer be on board with American education’s absurd fraternity and sorority system, a baffling culture that feels light years removed from any Irish person’s college experience. Forget dingy accommodation and housemates with master’s degrees in top-level eejitry. In Cruel Intentions college feels like a Harry Potter remake set in the lobby of Trump Tower.
It also suffers from being painfully miscast. Inheriting Phillippe’s role as the cad, Zac Burgess plays Lucien, a supposed ladies’ man who has the entire campus in a tizzy. But Burgess has all the magnetism of an overflowing recycling bin. He looks as if he should be playing a superhero’s weedy sidekick rather a jet-powered Lothario.
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Gellar’s stand-in, Sarah Catherine Hook, is more convincing, as she can conjure some of her predecessor’s apocalyptic nastiness. But it’s a one-note performance that never provides any insights into Caroline’s motivation and lacks the pantomime vim that Gellar brought.
The showrunners might argue that their Cruel Intentions should be judged on its own merits and that comparing it to a 25-year-old movie is pointless. But the only reason the series exists is to cash in on nostalgia for the original. To point out how much poorer it is feels more than reasonable.
Worst of all is the character of Annie (Savannah Lee Smith), who replaces Witherspoon’s Annette and is revealed to be the daughter of the US vice-president. She seems to have breezed in from a different drama: she is deadpan, wise to the charisma-deficient Lucien and far too much of a real person to convince as the third element of an overheated triangle of dim-witted privilege. That she would give the loathsome Lucien the time of day is entirely implausible.
It is a final nail in the coffin of a show that, aside from the presence on the soundtrack of Olivia Rodrigo’s zesty punk-pop, has nothing going for it.
