Overall Rating
  Awesome: 31.9%
Worth A Look: 28.22%
Average: 12.88%
Pretty Bad: 14.11%
Total Crap: 12.88%
12 reviews, 91 user ratings
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| Hard Candy |
by Jay Seaver
"Two strong performances can take a two-person movie far."
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"Hard Candy" lets the folks in the audience know from the start that it intends to make them uncomfortable. It's all of five minutes into the movie before we see that young Hayley Stark is about a decade younger than what the guy she's meeting should be looking at. By the time the film is over, it will be what people do rather than what they threaten to do that makes people uncomfortable, and not the way that the first scene suggests.Hayley (Ellen Page) met Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) online. He's handsome and charming, and probably more than twice her age (she could still be in junior high). They meet face-to-face for the first time at a local diner. He invites her back to his place for a drink and a look at his photography studio; she's cautious, but goes anyway. Arriving there, she sees that all of the pictures on the wall are young girls, but she turns out to be a step ahead of him - it's Jeff who has something he didn't plan on in his drink, and regains consciousness to find himself in a situation he's not ready for.
Brian Nelson's script is the sort of thing actors salivate over: It's built around a pair of good roles, each with lines a good actor can do a lot with. Both characters have dark sides, so nobody is stuck playing the victim for very long. And though the set-up is mostly two people in a small space verbally sparring, it's not just two actors shooting words at each other while the director tries to make things visually exciting with camera tricks: There's stuff to do, though for the most part it's not so strenuous or dangerous that the audience will be more impressed with the stuntmen than the cast. The audience will generally appreciate this, too, although they might be a little less overjoyed with how the dialogue is perhaps a bit too writerly.
It's mainly Ellen Page who has to deal with most of that; ever since Joss Whedon did great things with the Buffy TV series, a lot of writers have tended to err more on the side of making teens talk the way the writer wishes he or she had in high school, rather than how teenagers actually talk, and that's the case here. A dry comment about how this is what they should have badges for in Girl Scouts is kind of funny but also takes away from her being a believable kid, as does a lecture she delivers about treating kids like they're adults. She's supposed to be smart for her age, but sometimes Page has to kind of shift gears to get into that mode. She plays Hayley as a little overconfident, because as smart as she is, she can't anticipate everything or keep an adult man under control indefinitely. She's a nightmare teen, able to use her looks and brains to manipulate men, but she'd most interesting when she's overestimating her abilities, rather than acting like an all-but-supernatural avenger.
Patrick Wilson's part isn't as showy, since there's no sudden reveal that he's more than he appears, but he's just as essential to the film's success as Page. His job is to make the audience wonder just how egregious Jeff's activities have been - he's practiced enough that Hayley's obviously not the first young girl he's charmed, but he also seems cautious enough that we can't quite assume violence in his past. And after Hayley gets the upper hand, it's interesting to watch Wilson quickly alternate between being somewhat sympathetic - he's a creep, but that doesn't make him being the target of this sort of vigilantism okay - and being ready to explode with rage.
Director David Slade and his crew put together a very nice movie on what's probably a fairly low budget. Having two excellent performances helps immensely; a director who trusts his cast can keep turning the screws until the audience is ready to snap, because he sure that they'll hold the audience's interest. Perhaps the most important thing for Slade and company to do is to keep the film from feeling too much like a play, which is a constant threat with the small cast and (mostly) single location. Rather than using a hyperactive moving camera, he uses the framing to keep things interesting. It's unusual, for instance, to use such a widescreen picture indoors; the effect is to make the picture vertically claustrophobic while still giving his characters room to move around and show the expensive emptiness of the house. The film is intense - I'm told there were folks retreating or passing out at Sundance - although someone who saw it there mentioned there were scenes missing in the U.S. release. That may have been wise; making a couple scenes more graphic could be the difference between a tense thriller and tacky exploitation.Fortunately, it comes down on the "tense thriller" side. It may still be a little much for some, but overall it's just right.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11287&reviewer=371
originally posted: 06/02/06 22:45:42
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Sundance Film Festival. For more in the 2005 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 South By Southwest Film Festival For more in the 2006 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Florida Film Festival For more in the 2006 Florida Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2006 Philadelphia Film Festival For more in the 2006 Philadelphia Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
14-Apr-2006 (R)
DVD: 19-Sep-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
13-Jul-2006
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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