Do Revenge is a teen comedy loosely based on Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train. Drea(Camila Mendes) a middle class teen has spent her life infiltrating and integrating into upper class social circles and institutions. At the end of her junior year at private high school Rosehill a topless video she sent to her boyfriend is leaked, she blames him, he denies it, and she becomes a social outcast. At tennis camp she meets the mousy Eleanor(Maya Hawke) who's also been betrayed by the Rosehill elite. The two hatch a plan to 'do revenge'.
Mendes and Hawke have great chemistry and their play between the comedy and genuine emotion is confident but the script never really allows them to take off. The supporting cast is uneven, Sarah Michelle Geller as the headmistress and Sophie Turner as a rich girl ruined by Drea's quest for revenge, are wonderful, have presence, and bring a vitality to their characters. The same can't be said for the(might as well be) nameless Rosehill 'villains', they're too generic on the page and the actors aren't seasoned enough to differentiate them.
Visually pleasing, clearly filmed on location in Miami, there is a sense of place but competing with that is a bizarre kind of nostalgia, even though Gen Z has fully embraced 90's culture and fashion it doesn't quite translate here as true in terms of narrative. Instead of being a riff on or inspired by this type of 90's, early ought's mean girls flick this simply feels like it is trying to do exactly that, the only thing updated is the technology. It doesn't have enough edge, doesn't have enough to say, which is fine, it doesn't need to have higher ambitions but taken as a straight forward comedy it is simply not funny enough.
Casually diverting in the way 80% of Netflix movie offerings are. A laundry watch.
Currently streaming on Netflix.
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