[15 Apr 2006 | Saturday]
 |  So I went to see Hard Candy last night. The trailer'd intrigued me for quite some time. Check it out if you haven't already. If you need a little background, I got ya covered: Hard Candy is essentially the retelling of the whole Little Red Riding Hood tale with a bit of reality thrown into the mix, hence no big bad wolf. Instead of our lupin antagonist, we are greeted by a suave and nonthreatening older gentleman preying on a young 14 year old girl. He says all of the right things while being sure not to over-step his boundaries. He makes her feel comfortable and throws in all of the right, subtly hidden mildly sexual flirtations. It really meaders down a path that I thought was ripe for exploring, as these sorts of things seem to play out in the news on a daily basis: older man finds young girl on the internet and another statistic is added to the boards. The twist comes rather early on when our antagonist is drugged and accused of being a pedaphile, and subsequantly the murderer of a missing child. He's bound, somewhat gagged, and tortured for his alleged crimes. That being said, we're never actually shown in real proof of any crime. Sure the guy might be slick and he very well might be a raging kiddie diddler, but then again we're not sure. He's going through all of these really horrible events for what very well might be a bad case of misunderstandings. Sure he was fucked up for even meeting a girl 18 years his junior. Sure he was wrong for letting her drink on his premises, though he never encourages it. Sure he leads her down this path, but the fact is he never does anything. He never kisses her or touches her, hell about the only thing he does happens in the firt few minutes and is strongly forward at best. Nothing criminal. Now, I'm not saying the guy is free from guilt by any means, but the question this movie forces you to confront is does he deserve what he goes through? Who do you side with: the possible child molester who may not even be so or th young girl inflicting all of this torture on him in a form of pre-self defense if you will? Where do youn draw the line? Is it when he comes on to her? Did he deserve to be punished then? What about if she were to discover kiddie porn in his possesion? Does he deserve it then? What if the kiddie porn were generic, stuff that anyone could find on the internet? Is he a monster then? Does he deserve death? The Japanese have indulkged in statutory rape (by our definition) for ages now. Is that a whole country just begging to be burned to cinders? It's thoughts like that that had me in a bind dure Hard Candy. In fact if it weren't for the lack of characters that I could really indentify with, then I think I might have liked the flick more. The girl is not that tragic and comes off as a little bit too psychotic to be sympathized with. The guy is going through all of these terrible things, but then again he's not that tragic either since he transforms poorly in the third act. In fact, up until that thrid act the movie deals with a premise that needs adressing well, but then loses all ot its steam and turns into another semi-cookie cutter psychological thriller/whodunit. See it if you like. It's good, but not as provoking as I'd hoped it'd be. 7.8/10 Side Recommendations: The Professional (Awesome semi-illegal moments that Jean Reno calms and pushes aside aka How to intelligently deal with a teenage girl coming onto you.) |
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