Cinema: Mean Pills

A teenage twist on an old tale of sexual combat

Adolescents are, by their nature, heartless, randy and, as all the books inform their frantic parents, eager to test authority's limits. In other words, they have an affinity for Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Now that a young writer-director named Roger Kumble has turned Pierre Laclos's malevolent, much adapted minor masterpiece into a nastily assured teen flick, one has to wonder why it took so long for somebody to age-down its louche protagonists and update its setting.

In place of Laclos's 18th century decadents, Cruel Intentions offers us a modern prep-school Lothario (Ryan Phillippe, who looks a little like Leonardo DiCaprio on...

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