Monday, June 9, 2014

Masturbating Teenagers, Unsweet Statutory, And The Continued Seduction Of Selena Gomez Make Behaving Badly Creepier Than It Is Funny.


The Good: Fun, fast-paced dialogue, Good cast
The Bad: Third wall breaks, Creepy direction, Uses all of the conceits of the genre
The Basics: Behaving Badly is an unsettling sex comedy that has an impressive cast doing terrible things.


After pretty much every major studio release I watch, I try to catch an independent film. I like supporting indie films and trying to find a balance between the popular films and the art films in my reviews helps keep me a well-rounded reviewer. Sadly, not all independent or artsy films are actually worth it. Behaving Badly is one such “indie” film. While the movie has a surprisingly good cast for a movie unlikely to blow up at the box office, even with its August release, it fails to rise above a schmaltzy sex comedy. While there are sex-focused comedies (as opposed to romantic comedies that are focused on relationships, sex comedies are fundamentally just about a protagonist getting laid) that are actually worthwhile, Behaving Badly is not one. Behaving Badly is not this year’s Sex Drive (reviewed here!).

Behaving Badly is a lackluster comedy that seems like it is trading on Selena Gomez’s star power and the popularity of sex comedies as forged by prior works like American Pie and, to a much lesser extent, movies like Miss March (reviewed here!). In other words, the film trades much more on cheap background nudity, softcore seduction dialogue, and frequent references to teenage masturbation than anything genuinely clever. As is typical of these films, the teenage protagonists are unrealistically smart, beautiful and charmed by everything that is outside their initial characterization (in this case, Selena Gomez’s Nina Pennington is uber-religious – in a fundamentalist Christian way- yet finds it enchanting when Rick extorts his pedophilic adulterous father when they catch him with an underage hooker and the father of his best friend).

Rick Stevens is a fairly normal teenager who finds himself in a world of trouble with a dead body in his car trunk and a case of crabs when he finds his mother on the couch, near death, as part of her latest melodramatic suicide attempt. In the suicide note addressed to him, Rick learns that his mother found out that he had a fling with is best friend’s mother. The story flashes back to how Rick found himself in the predicament by going back two weeks prior to an average day. On that day, he more or less gets a blowjob from a stripper before his best friend’s mother, Pamela, seduces him. Rick worries about what this means for his chances with Nina Pennington, the girl he has lusted over for years. After Rick lies to Nina about knowing Josh Groban, who is in town for a concert the next night, Rick becomes determined to get backstage passes. To that end, Rick asks the local strip club owner for a favor and in exchange for tickets, he has to go buy ecstasy for the perverted scumbag. Screwed on that deal, Rick and his best friend Billy Bender witness their fathers at a nearby hotel having sex with an underage hooker, which helps them get out of a dent Rick put in the car.

Continuing to lust after the idealistic Nina, Rick tries to resist his hot lawyer (when the Aston Martin the Lithuanian mobsters who are fixing the car give him as a loaner gets him in trouble with the police) and Pamela. To raise money, Rick throws a party with his sister and her stripper friends. That leads to a number of arrests that force Rick to try to save all of the people in his life as well as rise to the occasion of being the boy that Nina wants him to be.

Behaving Badly has virtually all of the conceits of the genre, including the meathead ex-boyfriend of the chaste girl the protagonist lusts after who brings violence into mix and pointless drug references. The result is a movie that feels stale, despite the fast-pace of the dialogue and a few initially snappy jokes. The humor is split between quick, witty remarks and awkward attempts to sexualize a number of young actors and actresses who are playing characters much younger than they are. The visual gags are relegated to frequent shots of Billy nervously vomiting and things like sex toys being washed alongside dishes.

Instead of being funny or even titillating, Behaving Badly has a pretty high creep-out factor. Rick Stevens tells his lawyer he is seventeen when she offers him a cigarette, so most of the film is preoccupied with an underage boy getting statutory raped by his best friend’s mother and masturbating frequently. Actors Nat Wolff (Rick) and Lachlan Buchanan (Billy) might be of legal age, but the characters they play are not, so director Tim Garrick’s obsession with crotch shots of the two in their underwear is just creepy.

Behaving Badly is not even overly original. Rick gets into a bet with a psychopath that he can bed Nina and that’s the basic plot of at least one other popular sex comedy. So, fans of nudity and Selena Gomez blowing kisses and flirting to the camera are likely to feel that they have seen everything in Behaving Badly before. There is nothing exceptional or original about Behaving Badly.

That leads to the big mystery of Behaving Badly. How did Tim Garrick assemble such an impressive cast for such a piece of crap film?! Actors who participate in Behaving Badly include the hilarious Cary Elwes, Jason Lee and Patrick Warburton, along with a well-used Heather Graham, Elisabeth Shue, and Mary-Louise Parker. Dylan McDermott might well be playing his funniest character in his repertoire as strip club owner Jimmy Leach. The usually dramatic McDermott is slick, creepy, and does some hilarious physical comedy in Behaving Badly.

Nat Wolff plays the archetypal “I can’t get laid, but I seem to have sex all over the place” plain high school student Rick Stevens in Behaving Badly. Wolff is bland, but plays the straight-laced bland kid well.

Selena Gomez plays Nina Pennington and her role infuses something smart and satirical into the otherwise vacuous and dull Behaving Badly. Writers Tim Garrick and Scott Russell use Gomez to sneak in a number of lines about church hypocrisy and naïve overachievers that Gomez plays with a straight face well. Still, Gomez seems to be around mostly for the cute factor and the shock of the well-established good girl being around strippers, adulterers, and masturbating teenagers.

Even to see that, Behaving Badly is not worth it. The moments of cleverness and the moments the impressive cast is used in ways unconventional for the performers do not justify the rest of the film’s content. The jokes are more misses than hits and the only surprise in Behaving Badly was that the oft-referenced Josh Groban does not make a cameo appearance.

For other sex-driven films, please check out my reviews of:
Bound
Walk Of Shame
Making The Rules

2.5/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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