![crush]()
Stop me when this one sounds familiar:
A dour and quiet high school girl has a secret crush on a handsome and athletic boy, but since she can't have him she snaps and starts killing people all around the poor good-lookin' idiot. Sound familiar? Novel? Exciting? Then perhaps you need to see movies like
Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction, The Crush, May, and -- dear lord --
Swimfan, because the blandly-titled "new" movie called
Crush is little more than a tiresome collection of the most memorable things in those movies.
It's certainly not a crime to borrow from well-known thrillers but if you cannot bring at least one small kernel of originality (or at least novelty) to your own movie, it's pretty damn tough to imagine why a movie watcher would want to spend 93 minutes on it. To its mild credit,
Crush does manage to throw a few curveballs in the middle of Act III but by the time they pop up you'll be way too bored to care.
The lovely Sarah Bolger and the (yes, very handsome) Lucas Till provide better performances than this paper-thin premise deserves, and the gal who plays the dour and loveless Bess (Crystal Reed) also does a fine job of bringing a few interesting shades to a grimly one-note character. The always-cool Holt McCallany has three scenes as an absentee dad, screenwriter Leigh Whannell pops up for a few minutes, and Isaiah "Old Spice" Mustafa is on hand as a tough soccer coach. (And I swear I saw Meredith Salenger for one minute!)
None of them are able to elevate the snooze-worthy copycat of a screenplay provided by remake producer Sonny Mallhi -- who also wrote the similarly awful
The Roommate from a few years back. Even putting aside the casual plagiarism in Mallhi's screenplays, there's nothing here in the way of character, suspense, intensity, or surprises. It's just someone telling the same old story with slightly different character.
Stop me when this one sounds familiar: