★★½
“Burned at the stake.”
Bella Thorne’s struggle to appear in a film which reaches three stars on this site, continues unabated. While probably not helped by my tendency to confuse her with Kristen Stewart, that’s five attempts now. Although, for a minute here, I thought this might be the one where she finally cracked it, with a potentially interesting first half. But it could not sustain itself, and as the final credits rolled, and I saw Guinevere Turner’s name as the co-writer… Yeah, it all made sense. I mean, she wrote Bloodrayne. And I’m one of the few people who didn’t utterly hate that. She has… a certain type of script, shall we say, and leave it at that.
Here, the heroine is Clare Bleecker (Thorne), a high school student – Thorne was 24 when this was filmed, so about that… – recently transferred in from the East coast after the death of her parents. She’s staying with her grandmother (De Mornay), and moonlights as a vigilante. We first see her allowing herself to get picked up by a sketchy driver, whom she strangles and stabs to death. The resulting police interrogation brings her to the attention of Detective Timmons (Phillippe). But Clare is undaunted, and proceeds to look into the string of girls who have gone missing in the town, crimes going back decades which have never been solved. When her friend Julianna (Rovaris) becomes the latest to vanish, Clare decides the time for passive investigation has gone.
The early stages are, as noted, interesting enough to be intriguing. There’s a nice touch where her conscience is represented by regular visits from the ghost of one of her victims – albeit an accidental one. However, he all but vanishes after she discovers there’s a bigger problem in town than just random scum-bag men, and the film’s issues tend to multiply thereafter. It’s never adequately explained why Clare has gone all Death Wish in her teenage years, or the Joan of Arc inspiration. Perhaps the book on which the film is based, Clare At 16 (or, I guess, at 24), does a better job of that, but without a particular motivation beyond “Men are bad, m’kay?”, the flaws in plotting became increasingly apparent to me.
And others too, apparently: it took three years to get distribution. I do respect Thorne for trying, even if the results have been underwhelming, and would encourage her to keep trying. As I suspect I’ve said before: she isn’t particularly the problem here, so much as the material. There’s an entire thread about Clare trying to get a part in the school play which is spectacularly out of place. But Thorne’s post-Disney career has never exactly been one known for her making good choices: witness the whole OnlyFans debacle. I was more interest in watching Clare operate as a small-town version of Dexter, punishing the guilty while maintaining a facade of normality. The further this went, the more ludicrous this instead became.
Dir: Mitzi Peirone
Star: Bella Thorne, Ryan Phillippe, Joy Rovaris, Rebecca De Mornay