Title: Girls Against Boys<\/p>\n
Directed By: Austin Chick<\/p>\n
Starring: Danielle Panabaker, Nicole LaLiberte, Andrew Howard, Michael Stahl-David, Liam Aiken<\/B><\/p>\n
You think you\u2019ve got relationship problems now? Just wait until you catch \u201cGirls Against Boys.\u201d Guy or girl, you\u2019ll never want to attempt a date again.<\/p>\n
Shae\u2019s (Danielle Panabaker) your average New York City college girl \u2013 well, minus the massive apartment she has all to herself and her unconventional boyfriend Terry (Andrew Howard), a 40-something guy with a kid. When Terry opts to do the right thing and try to work things out with his wife, Shae\u2019s crushed and sulks her way through her shift bartending at a trendy nightclub. When one of the newer bartenders, Lu (Nicole LaLiberte), catches Shae tearing up, she suggests the two go grab a drink.<\/p>\n
One drink turns into countless shots at another wild nightclub where the ladies dance it up with Simon (Michael Stahl-David) and his buddies. When the dancing schvitz takes the bounce out of Shae\u2019s curls, the group calls it a night and heads back to the guys\u2019 place for one last beer and certain something else. But when Shae takes a pass on the latter, Simon insists. With her mother busy at work and her best friend not answering her cell, Shae turns back to Lu who vows to end Shae\u2019s man problems \u2013 literally.<\/p>\n
Bad boyfriends are lame, so seeing a pair of armed and dangerous leading ladies fight back in \u00fcber gruesome ways should be a blast. However, rather than have some fun with the concept, writer-director Austin Chick takes his material way too seriously, turning what could have been a murderous romp into something truly disturbing, disgusting and often quite miserable.<\/p>\n
Killer or not, you\u2019ve got to want to root for the protagonist, but Shae never manages to earn an ounce of sympathy \u2013 even when she really should. Yes, you\u2019ll feel bad for her when she\u2019s taken advantage of, but her behavior beforehand totally dilutes the appeal of the character. The girl was dating an older man with a kid; what did she think was going to happen? He was going to cut his wife and kid off for her completely? Of course not, and Terry even tries to end their fling in a respectful manner. It\u2019s Shae that sulks and lurks around his house ultimately enticing him to cross the line one last time. It\u2019s her fault!<\/p>\n
The rest of the film crashes and burns courtesy of Shae\u2019s relationship with Lu because it\u2019s entirely unfounded. Lu is pretty persuasive when she first crosses paths with a lonely Shae and offers to help, but when things get bloody, Shae should have put her foot down for the sake of morality in general and because that\u2019s the character that Chick established in the first half of the film. You just can\u2019t have a good girl with a cute little cat who sobs in a ball on the floor when she loses a guy turn around and be okay with blowing her enemies away.<\/p>\n
Admittedly, I may tend to give Panabaker a little more credit than she deserves, but here I really am hesitant to blame her for Shae\u2019s problems because all of the characters are underdeveloped, the story is totally nonsensical and Chick\u2019s shot selection makes everything exponentially worse. At least a quarter of \u201cGirls Against Boys\u201d consists of unnecessarily long close-ups on Panabaker emoting and while emote she does, it\u2019s generally not the emotion you\u2019d expect, making the character incredibly difficult to track. <\/p>\n
The film also suffers from travel overload. The characters take countless cabs, have a karaoke session during a drive out of the city and ride a Vespa to Coney Island. Of course they\u2019ve got to have a means of transportation to get from one place to the next, but do we have to experience such a huge chunk of the drive with them? On the bright side, the driving material is a major step up from Shae\u2019s laughably frequent trips to the bathroom.<\/p>\n
Clearly \u201cGirls Against Boys\u201d has a number of detrimental problems, but it is worth noting that Chick did approach the project with some good intentions and they manage to shine through every once in a while. First off, he\u2019s got an excellent handle on the tone of the film. It doesn\u2019t work very well and makes the material quite dreary, but it\u2019s consistent and that at least helps keep the piece afloat. He also offers up a handful of unnervingly memorable moments, one of the best of which is a deep conversation about Cap\u2019n Crunch while one of the girls\u2019 victims bleeds all over the floor behind them.<\/p>\n
If only Chick had committed to this more playful approach rather than attempting to put together a preachy piece about feminism and then drowning it in desperate attempts of authorial expressivity we might have ended up with something more along the lines of a fun, campy slasher film. Instead, Chick tries to make \u201cGirls Against Boys\u201d something that it\u2019s not \u2013 a film that\u2019s got something profound to say.<\/p>\n
Technical: B<\/p>\n
Acting: B<\/p>\n
Story: C-<\/p>\n
Overall: C<\/p>\n
![\"Girls](\"http:\/\/g-ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/G\/01\/imdb\/plugins\/rating\/images\/imdb_31x14.png\")