‘Cruel Intentions’ Review: Amazon Remake Dishes Out Liaisons Too Sizzle-Free to Feel Dangerous
Amazon’s new Cruel Intentions television series is completely pointless, which isn’t the worst of sins, but isn’t much of a virtue either.
Roger Kumble’s 1999 film of the same title took Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ frequently adapted Les Liaisons Dangereuses and gave it a modern spin which, if nothing else, understood a lot of what was so pointedly twisty about it. The movie delivered some satisfying, dirty fun in a tight 97 minutes, with a spectacular cast that easily smoothed over any bumps in the thematically muddled story.
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Phoebe Fisher and Sara Goodman’s Amazon series takes the potent premise, with its backstabbing and sexual hijinks, and mostly just manages to stretch it out across an eight-episode season — and presumably beyond, since very little is resolved by the finale. Its attempts to update the already updated tale are mostly hollow, and its ensemble of pretty young actors mostly forgettable.
It’s vaguely watchable on its Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox terms, and for all of its excesses of elongation, individual episodes remain briskly under 45 minutes. But in a world in which multiple iterations of Gossip Girl have been more successfully trashy, the long-running Greek more generally likable and topical and The Sex Lives of College Girls, returning for its third season this very week, much funnier, I was unable to find a single surprise or performance or idea to give this Cruel Intentions any worth of its own.
Television really ought to aspire higher than just giving audiences a brand they recognize and saying, “If you liked this thing before, here’s that thing you liked, but less good and more of it.” Too often, it does not.
The action this time has been moved from high school to the completely nondescript Manchester College, which is apparently a snooty outpost for the learned elite, but lacks any visual opulence whatsoever. The narrative is primarily set in two Greek houses and a couple of dorm rooms, so when descriptions of the series mention that the school is “a Washington, D.C.-adjacent university,” my response is halfway between, “prove it” and “so what?” The show was filmed in Ontario and could be anywhere, but it is mostly nowhere.
Caroline Merteuil (Sarah Catherine Hook) is the ascending president of Delta Phi, which has been her lifelong ambition in part because she yearns to prove herself to her lobbyist mother (Claire Forlani’s Claudia), a former Delta Phi president. As a new academic year in which nobody takes any classes begins, Caroline is facing a potentially large problem: An incident of hazing from the previous spring has put the entire Greek system in jeopardy. Oh no!
But Caroline, a master manipulator, has a plan. She figures that if she and Delta Phi are able to recruit Annie Grover (Savannah Lee Smith), daughter of the vice president of the United States, to join the chapter, they’ll have too much clout to be dissolved. While I could list a half-dozen things about this basic premise that make no sense, “who cares?” would be the biggest.
In order to lure Annie, Caroline enlists her stepbrother Lucien Belmont (Zac Burgess), a lizard-like sex tape aficionado (unsuccessfully latching early Soderbergh onto the show’s influences) and treasurer of the affiliated Alpha Gamma Zeta fraternity, to seduce Annie. What Lucien sleeping with Annie would actually do to keep the Greek system in place is murky, but Caroline promises him that if he succeeds in his mission, he can have sex with her for an hour. If he fails at wooing the somewhat virginal Annie, Caroline gets his car.
Minus the dumb Greek stuff, this is, of course, completely the plot of the movie. Which is all fine and well, but anybody with even a peripheral awareness of any of the source material may have already noticed a flaw. The wager at the root of the story is designed to reflect the venal hollowness of the upper class. These characters use each other like pieces on a chessboard, half out of a desire for base revenge and half out of sheer boredom. It’s a game, and nobody cares how many lives are ruined. Here, what Caroline is asking Lucien to do is kinda just a favor, and one that really benefits both of them. The “having sex with your step-sibling” and “fancy vintage automobile” bits are superficial add-ons to what is otherwise the arc of a season of Greek.
Why the focus on the Greek system, anyway? Well, it’s a much less interesting but differently stratified hierarchy to substitute for the affluence of New York’s Upper East Side or pre-Revolution France. To what end? Unclear. For reasons that are thoroughly underdeveloped, Caroline’s faithful lackey Cece (Sara Silva) takes a job as a TA to a professor (Hank Chadwick, played by Sean Patrick Thomas, who was in the first Cruel Intentions film) teaching a “Fascism, Then and Now” class. She gives an extraordinarily flimsy reason for wanting to work with him, but the truth is that somebody thought this was an opportunity to talk about abuses of power and resistance to those abuses, and to try and parallel Caroline’s style of leadership with that of Hitler and Mussolini.
This, incidentally, is the closest the new Cruel Intentions comes to having an angle — though as executed, it doesn’t feel especially 2024, despite our general cultural conversation about encroaching fascism these past few months. Are there things to say about the intersection of sexual abuses and power in 2024? Look no further than the evolving cabinet for the ascending presidential administration for a reminder that the answer is yes. But this is not the #MeToo Cruel Intentions.
Say what you will about Goodman and Fisher’s previous Amazon adaptation of a ’90s Sarah Michelle Gellar vehicle, 2021’s I Know What You Did Last Summer — at least it had an instantly introduced twist which announced that it would not be what you were expecting from the brand.
Compared to the movie, Amazon’s Cruel Intentions has a little more swearing and a slightly more enlightened focus on its gay characters. But there’s exactly zero sense that the creators have found a current conversation they want to the hitch the show to, a novel take to give the story a fresh spin or an attitude about the dangers being a young person in this over-mediated age that could infuse it with a new identity. Even the scripts’ references and slang, though periodically cutting and funny, sound filtered through a millennial-filled writers’ room, rather than organic to college-aged people in today’s reality.
What’s odd is that although the “Fascism, Then and Now” thread is somewhere between tin-eared and thoroughly inappropriate, it was my favorite aspect of the series — in part because it’s the only element that isn’t pandering to “iconic” moments and costumes and line-readings from a 25-year-old movie, and in larger part because in a cast of undistinguished performances, Silva was responsible for most of my laughs and the only emotional connection I felt to anything. She plays Cece as a wounded, fast-talking eccentric out of an Amy Sherman-Palladino show, and it works. Plus, there’s actually a little chemistry, however inappropriate, between Cece and the professor. A very little.
There’s some measure of legitimacy conveyed by the grown-up corner of the cast, including Thomas, Forlani, John Tenney as a congressman described as a conservative but not demonstrably anything, and Adam Arkin, who plays the stern dean threatening the Greek system in the premiere and then never again. Arkin, not coincidentally, directed that episode. It’s the only one with an appreciable visual style — lots of tracking shots through fraternity and sorority houses — and the only one that doesn’t make the locations/sets feel claustrophobic and cheap.
As for the young cast? Besides Silva, I thought John Harlan Kim, as a gay Alpha brother who looks like he might be Caroline’s plotting equal and then is not, was having fun. Otherwise, blandness reigns. Hook resembles a combination of Cruel Intentions star Reese Witherspoon and Greek star Spencer Grammer, but her performance is Queen Bee 101. That’s better than Burgess, who comes across an affected brat instead of the louche Lothario the role requires. It’s very rare that onscreen siblings giving no impression at all of wanting to rip each other’s clothes off is a negative, yet here we are.
The Les Liaisons Dangereuses formula requires heat. It requires gut punches of betrayal and manipulation. It can lend itself to high drama or camp or dark comedy. But it needs to make you feel something other than, “Seriously, this again?”
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