Review of Hard Candy (2005) by John V — 22 Jul 2015

Hard Candy had lots of potential but the execution is a massive disappointment. The brief opening scene was unfortunately the highlight of the film, igniting a wide grin across my face. But that grin quickly faded until I was begging the film to wrap up.

The first thing I noticed was the camerawork. It's a mild complaint given the remaining flaws but the cinematography felt far too cramped. It gave no sense of location or space, and the editing made the initial conversations between Page and Wilson feel awkward and disjointed.

I have few gripes about the stylistic look of the film although one particular fast-paced sequence feels very poorly done, bursting from out of nowhere and offering more intangible camerawork. The biggest problem with Hard Candy is the script which has various flaws within itself.

Similar to the camera, the movie is constantly in your face. There is absolutely no subtlety in its storytelling, forcing it to sound preachy and unintelligent. Every detail is made to seem so obvious and every line is written in such a way that the most simple themes are practically shouted at the audience.

At first I thought Ellen Page was just giving a very bad performance but now I realize that the script is (mostly) to blame. She still did a fairly mediocre job in my opinion, often over-acting and bringing out the film's unrealistic nature even further.

But Page's character is the worst part about the film by far. The filmmaking issue that Hard Candy suffers from is that we don't care about the characters. At first Page's character Hayley seems like a good protagonist - a shy, innocent girl who may be smarter than she looks.

And when combined with Wilson's antagonist, Jeff - a pedophilic creep who might not be in complete control - we have the potential for a good, thrilling story. Unfortunately Hayley becomes a two-dimensional psychopath with hardly any backstory or motivation to her actions.

Her dialogue is condescending and quite annoying. I feel like Brian Nelson, the screenwriter, was trying so hard for Hayley to seem cool and hardcore that he forgot the audience needs to connect to her emotionally.

Combine her completely insane actions, unrealistic dialogue and complete lack of character development and you get a hero we can't root for. On the other hand, Jeff is actually given two scenes in which he discusses his past, one of the scenes being a sort of relief from Hayley's monotone personality.

He's a questionable villain with a backstory, a motivation and multiple demeanors. He feels real! I found myself caring about him, not Hayley. That is...until he proved to be nearly as stupid. His actions later on in the film made my attention drop even more.

So to put things simply: we don't know who to root for because both characters are unlikeable and fail to create an emotional connection. The film felt like a bad play half the time, with dialogue and scenes going nowhere, repeating the same thing over and over.

Finally, the film promotes itself as a thriller. Unfortunately there might be only two minor thrills throughout its excruciating duration. The problem in this particular area goes back to Page's character.

As I mentioned, she has no character development. She never learns anything, she never changes. In addition, she is practically in control of every situation in the movie - the reason it's not exciting.

There's nothing on the line, nothing to hold our attention and seemingly no threat to her character. The film could have easily been creative with the premise but it goes nowhere. The only redeemable factor in this movie is Patrick Wilson's performance which was actually pretty impressive.

He brought a good variety of emotions and delivered many scenes/monologues with great control of his character. Too bad the rest of the movie was awful.