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119 of 150 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A controversial film and an emergence of talented Ellen Page, June 29, 2006
The film directed by David Slade and written by Brian Nelson seems disturbing enough for just the subject matter alone, but it's also eerie in how timely it's release has been. With reports of teenage girls becoming victims of internet sexual predators appearing in all types of news media, Hard Candy arrives in the theaters through a limited release to highlight this current trend. Slade and Nelson has created an disturbing and, at times, a very uncomfortable film that shows the many twists and turns that happens when the roles of prey and predator become interchangeable.
There's no denying that Hard Candy aims to put a new twist on the exploitation subgenre of the rape-revenge films that dominated the late 70's and early 80's. Brian Nelson's clearly channeling the influences from such rape-revenge fantasy films like Mastrosimone's Extremities and the very disturbing and exploitive I Spit On Your Grave (Day of the Woman) by Meir Zarchi. From the beginning the audience is shown the set-up of an adult instant messenging another person with the screen name of Thonggrrl14. Thonggrrl14 is in fact a 14 year-old teenage girl named Hayley and the adult on the other end a 32 year-old photographer named Jeff who goes by the screen name Lensman319. Jeff has an unhealthy and disturbing penchant for pubescent girls as the subject of his camera lens.
From their first meeting meeting at a coffee house where Jeff gradually begins a flirtatious conversation with the young Hayley to the point in the first act when he finally convinces her to go back to his house whcih doubles as his studio. There's really no denying the sense of unease that permeates the first act as Hard Candy gradually paints Jeff as the sexual predator that he is. There's no denying the fact that a man of his age should not be flirting and behaving as if the girl across from him is a fully-grown and developed woman of similar age. Hayley also comes across during this first act like a teenage girl dazzled by an older man who treats her older than her real age. It's really a disturbing look at just how easily an adult can seduce a child into doing things they normally shouldn't be doing.
Hayley (played by young Canadian actor Ellen Page) soons shows just how wrong and mistaken Jeff has been in picking her as his new prey. I don't use that word loosely for that is what this film truly is when boiled down to its basic component. A one-on-one three-act play (Brian Nelson's experience as a playwright shows in the stage-like sequences from beginning to end) between a predator and prey. This time around the prey has turned out to be the one who has done the hunting and the consequences on the wanna-be predator that is Jeff leads to a slow and deliberate set-up that looks like something out of Takashi Miike's Audition. Hayley's turning the tables on her stalker shows that girls her age are intelligent enough to know that what Jeff is doing is wrong. Hayley's answer to that is to be the hunter instead and fix Jeff's "problem" through what she calls as "preventive maintenance." What she calls "preventive maintenance" is bound to cause many men in the audience to sit very uncomfortably and wince on more than once occassion.
The acting job done by Ellen Page (balancing her indie work here with a turn as Kitty Pride in the upcoming X3: The Last Stand) is dazzling and really shows her as an up and coming talent that needs to be watched. She was technically 15 year-old when the film was made and already she showed a keen grasp of the script which deals with disturbing topics. There's a scene in Jeff's car as they reach his home where a passing glance of the camera at her face shows not a gullible teenager, but a determined and somewhat oft-kiltered individual who knows what she will be doing in the coming hours will be medieval harsh but in her mind justified. Patrick Wilson (last seen as Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera)as Jeff plays the would-be sexual predator admirably. His range of emotions go from outright denials of Hayley's accusations to impotent rage and desperation as his fate is described to him in Miike-like detail by his teenage captor.
If there's a flaw to mar the intense and suffocating atmosphere this stage-like film creates it would be in the script itself. At times the Hayley character becomes a one-note individual whose beyond her years demeenor seemed to cold and rehearsed. I really can't put the blame for this on Ms. Page, but on the writer himself. It seems like Brian Nelson is trying too hard to add twist and turns on the story being told. He seems to enjoy overmuch his ability to tug back and forth on his audiences' emotional investment in the film and the two characters. He actually pulls off the trick of making the sexual predator earn the audiences' sympathy at what is about to be done to him. But instead of continuing on with that tangent and thus putting Hayley on a darker and more sinister light, Nelson backs off and pulls the audience back to wanting physical and emotional destruction to be visited on Jeff. Nelson used to much zig-zagging in making his script look more complicated than it ought to be. A rape-revenge film works best on its most simplest form.
The direction by David Slade (well-known as a music video director) is actually very subdued and deliberate in its pacing. Slade doesn't fall back onto his music video experience with unnecessary quick-cut editing that's plagued his music video director brethren. Slade manages to pull off a very Hitchcockian-style of directing by letting the stage and the actors speak for the scene without much bells and whistles to clutter things. There's a few sequences where he lets the camera film things through one long, continuous take thus adding a sense of realism to the situation developing inside Jeff's home. I was really impressed with Slade's work and looking forward to see what he intends to do to follow-up Hard Candy.
The use of too much twists and turns in the script notwithstanding, Hard Candy is a tour de force piece of suspenseful filmmaking that borders on the great psychological horror films of the 70's. In fact, the subject matter on the screen lends a sense of real horror to the film with its timely release and story. Any parent or adult who knows teenagers who use MySpace.com would think hard about wanting to know more of what their kids are doing on the net. Hard Candy can be brutal at times and almost suffocating at others with little or no levity to break the tension. It's a difficult film to sit through and probably won't be the type of films for some, but just watching the performance by Ellen Page is worthy of the price of a ticket. The subject matter is very adult and straddles the line of what constitute a rated R film and one strictly for adults only. Hard Candy definitely falls on the latter. 8.5/10.
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70 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I hated it, the best film of 2006, June 3, 2006
It's safe to say that before the release of the film I was basically foaming at the mouth in anticipation. I don't know what it was that drew me so strongly to it, but there was something about it that just wet my appetite for great cinema.
So, the week came when it was to be released, and Friday rolled around. I went to see it - and left utterly disappointed. I don't know what I expected from the film, from all the press I read I expected simple torture then an end to the film, but what I got, I later realized, was so much more.
The story, although topical to some degree, is at first glance a story of one person wanting to teach another a lesson about the "naughty" things they do, ALA Seven and Saw. But as the film unfolds the true faces are shown, and they're ugly. Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson turn in flawless performances, as they're the only main actors in the film, Sandra Oh plays a small, yet somewhat vital role, and then there's that one guy at the cafe.
The reason I detested this movie was for one simple reason - manipulation. NEVER in my life have I seen a film where my beliefs and feelings concerning the characters has shifted so furiously between one and the other. You sincerely believe that Jeff is an innocent man and that Haley is simply a sociopath. As the story unfolds, if you see the film in the same light as I did, by the end you'll be completely worn out, and left with a feeling of bleakness.
With most recent horror films focusing mainly on the gore aspect, and very little story, albeit one as complex as this, it was incredibly refreshing to see a horror/suspense film that was something that could just possibly top Hitchcock in his finest hour.
A true masterpiece.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
bad execution of a good idea, January 21, 2007
I tried ages ago to post a lengthy and mostly critical review of this but for whatever reason it never made it up (hmmmmm). So this review is going to be far less detailed because I just don't want to type up all those thoughts over again.
Hard Candy is a really frustrating film because it could have been a great one. The premise is a grabber and the actors are very talented and game, but the problem is that the script just collapses as the movie goes on. The fatal flaw is that the writers suddenly decide about halfway through that Hayley is going to be a genius mastermind figure, instead of the precocious, ambitious, more or less realistic girl she starts out as.
Mastermind figures in suspense movies are useful to writers because they always are one step ahead of everybody else. So they can set up diabolical schemes and traps simply to torment their victims and generate lots of suspense for the audience. Since they know what people will do ahead of time, they know how to stage these traps to maximize drama, to make their victims think they have the upper hand, but they are always in control and pull the rug out from under at the last minute. Why do they do all this? Well, because they are supergenius masterminds and they like to mess with people, to put them through the ringer. Now, an omniscient supergenius in a movie like in Saw, for example, is fine given the limited ambitions of Saw (and don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Saw). But here, in a movie that should have had ambitions to be more than a generic thrill machine, it is just the wrong thing to do and particularly when you are talking about a 14 year old protagonist. And so, the last half of the movie is filled with completely implausible and virtually impossible plot developments all meant just to milk a few more manipulative thrills from the basic set up. Think hard about virtually any of the situations in the second half and ask yourself *why* Jeff or Hayley do certain things and how or why Hayley would bother to orchestrate these narrative events to occur if she knew from the start all the things she is revealed to know at the end. Once you start to question, you realize how completely overengineered the plot twists are.
The bottom line is that the writing is fundamentally lazy and the narrative events stunningly arbitrary, which is a serious disappointment given the potential this idea had.
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