Review of Wild Things (1998) by Dylan C — 12 Nov 2010

Lustrous, distasteful, and gaudy, "Wild Things" is guaranteed to push buttons and offend but at the same time, it's well made and skillfully directed. One can't criticize "Wild Things" of taking a serious subject like teenage sexual abuse and using it to craft a thriller, that's exactly what it wants to do.

It wants to be exploitative, it wants to be lurid, it wants to be in bad taste. None of that offended me in "Wild Things" but what I didn't like was the movie's predictability. For a thriller, "Wild Things" is obvious and lacks suspense.

It takes place in Blue Bay, Florida, where Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards) attends high school and flirts with her guidance counselor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon). One day after washing his car for a school fundraiser, Kelly returns home and claims that Sam raped her.

Two detectives Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon) and Gloria Perez (Daphne Rubin-Vega) investigate and hear from another high school student Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell) that Sam raped her a year ago. In order to defend himself in court, Sam hires Ken Bowden (Bill Murray) as his lawyer, who also lends some unexpected humor to balance out the seriousness of the movie.

As expected, Neve Campbell and Denise Richards have a soft core scene that's knowingly exploitative and unnecessary but obligatory in these types of movies nowadays. With that in mind however, the movie does have a brain and even if that brain isn't as sharp as I'd have hoped, there's no denying that it knows what it's doing.

"Wild Things" has plenty of twists for a thriller but many of these twists are surprisingly predictable. If you watch movies regularly, you should have no trouble breaking down the plot and sniffing out all the twists long before they happen.

However despite these obvious twists, Director John McNaughton gives the movie a sense of style and appeal that will cater to whodunit mystery fans. I give "Wild Things" a modest recommendation despite its obvious plot twists because the rest of the movie is slick and fun, making it the perfect guilty pleasure.