Sweet, Sour, Stupid

Oh, to be fourteen again - starting high school, first kisses, tying up and torturing grown men before running off to a movie with your best bud...

Everything seemed much more innocent, much more -

I'm sorry...what? What was that? You never did that last thing? That torturing thing? Geez, you must be old. What, did you grow up in the 80's or something? Don't you know all the cool kids these days go online to trap potential pedophiles, meet them at coffeehouses, flirt their way into their homes and then punish them for going along with all of it?

At least, that's what resourceful little Hayley does in Hard Candy, a new movie that's slowly being released across the country. This fourteen-year-old protagonist believes her friend was seduced and harmed by an older man who got away with it, and she's going to take justice into her smooth, tiny little hands.

The movie is basically a cat-and-mouse thriller that begins with a wonderfully played scene in the aforementioned coffeehouse and then takes place almost entirely in Jeff's chic, modern L.A. lair. Hayley (Ellen Page) has a lot more in mind than just running to the police with the first bit of evidence she can find. No, she's convinced Jeff (Patrick Wilson) was involved with her friend's disappearance, and she's going to make him pay.

Using a combination of roofies, rope, e-mails, ice packs and medical textbooks, Hayley terrorizes the thirty-two-year-old man with the skill of someone who's seen a lot of movies. It helps that Jeff, as written by Brian Nelson, is a complete idiot who has apparently never seen a horror movie and will gladly investigate any strange sound no matter how ominous. Doesn't he know that if he's tied to a chair with only one free foot to push himself around, he maybe shouldn't wheel out into the middle of the living room and call for Hayley to stop hiding just because he managed to grab a gun with his severely restricted hand? Dude, gun or no gun, you want her to hide. At least when she's hiding she can't spray bleach down your throat, right?

If you're going to have a psychological battle between two characters, at least make it a remotely even playing field. Conveniently for the filmmakers, Hayley is, of course, wise beyond her years (talking about and knowing things nowhere near the intellectual radar of a fourteen-year-old). Conversely, Nelson and director David Slade apparently think the only way Hayley could ever out-smart her enemy is if he's not very smart to begin with. I stopped counting how many times I restrained myself from yelling "Um, hello!" every time Jeff did the exact opposite thing a trapped, tortured man would do.

Also, if they wanted Hayley to be incredibly (I would say unbelievably) smart, that's fine. That could be fun, even. There are child prodigies in math, science and music, among other subjects, so why not a child prodigious in torture? And, since she's basically the "good guy" in this thriller, I guess the audience would root for her. But do they have to make it so hard for us? Anyone who snaps "playtime is over!" to their dumbfounded target cannot be taken seriously. Who talks like that?

The always-brilliant Rich at FourFour said it best when he described Hayley's heavy-handed dialogue as "rants and raves about dirty 32-year-old men with the finesse of a women's studies major at Stereotype U." I would add "a women's study major who only recently discovered the internet." As much as Hard Candy (which is internet slang for an under-age girl) tries to be topical about online stalking (which can only mean it will be seriously, laughably dated in about two minutes), it doesn't come up with believable tech references for such computer-literate characters.

More problematic is, after being with just these two people for an hour and a half, we barely know either of them at all. Of course the audience is going to care in a generic, theoretical way about a child who's fighting for her life to avenge a friend, but it's hard to specifically care about the enigmatic Hayley. Plus, while the dialogue is awful, Page and the writers do effectively give us a know-it-all brat of a teenager, and who wants to spend time with one of those? Even parents don't want to spend time with their own teens - why should we? Inflicting vicious pain is what makes her interesting; unfortunately, most of the time she paces back and forth waxing philosophically on why men like Jeff are bad. Guess what? Every reasonable human being already knows.

And Jeff? He's a fashion photographer who likes underage girls...and that's about all we have. Both actors are impressive with such strained, intense material but they just don't have a lot to work with. While that makes it all the more admirable when they do find the different levels in each scene, they can't elevate the material overall.

In an interview, Nelson said, "We spoke to some audience members at an early screening with a real gender breakdown, where guys were like, `She should be caught!' and the women were like, `This should be shown in sex-education classes.'" The gender-divide is an interesting point, but unrelated to my experience. My female companion laughed at the movie louder than I did. Since it was her idea to see the movie, when the end credits rolled, she turned to me and whispered, "Sorry."

Besides, both groups are missing the point. I say, who cares?

The film's poster doesn't have a tag line, so I'll make one up for them:

Hard Candy - Never accept candy from strangers...

Or maybe:

Hard Candy - Sweet, sour and deadly.

But I prefer this one, which I mean literally:

Hard Candy - This is one pill you don't want to swallow.