Behaving Badly

Life for high schooler Rick Stevens (Nat Wolff) is going all wrong. His mom tries to commit suicide and "While I'm Dead Feed the Dog" is painted on the garage door. It starts with his crush on school hottie Nina Pennington (Selena Gomez). He loses his virginity to his best friend's mom (Elisabeth Shue). His own mom (Mary-Louise Parker) appears as Saint Lola, the saint of teenage sex. He gets pushed into a bet with the mobster's son about having sex with Nina before Arbor Day. She has just broken up with her boyfriend. She likes Josh Groban and he tries to buy backstage passes from sleazy Jimmy Leach (Dylan McDermott).

This is trying to be a teen sex romp with broad satirical humor. It fails in many different ways. The first is that it fails to make Rick a likeable character. The movie needs to dump on him again and again so that he becomes sympathetic. For all the bad things that is supposed to be happening to him, the first big thing in the timeline is him having sex with his best friend's hot mom. He gets the date with the dream girl too early and too easily. He is too dislikable. Selena Gomez is completely bland as the goody girl. The movie is trying to be crude but it's trying too hard. Everything is ugly. The humor is way off. I don't know that much about director Tim Garrick and his writing partner Scott Russell. They don't have much of a track record but I did see their earlier writing effort, Jailbait. It has the same teen sex romp writing with broad satirical takes. The actors are lower grade, the production is lower, and the level of humor is similar. At least, that one's satire marginally works. None of this one works and it's a grind from the very start. I grew to hate the repeat-o-punchlines. This is wasting the talents of some pretty good actors in the adult roles. It's bad.

This movie wants to be "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", "Risky Business" and "American Pie" but it misses the mark severely and just doesn't have what made those other films good or even great. It's shock-value for the sake of shock-value and gross for the sake of being gross. There is no real heart or soul in this film. The characters are stereotypical for the sake of being stereotypical with no real cleverness or subversion happening. This film could have also really benefitted greatly from a script doctor, because so much of this comes off as low-budget fodder that a production company shoots out to fill their yearly quota. I do not blame the author of the novel this is based off of for disavowing this film.

Also I'm so sick of this "blaming a teenager for a grown adult perusing them sexually" trope. It is udder nonsense. It sends a horrid message that absolves any responsibility from the adults at hand who should know better than to actively seek out to be with a minor.

Overall, "Behaving Badly" had potential, but the creators behind the scenes clearly didn't care about fulfilling any of it.

Somewhere in this tangled mess of debauchery and off-kilter, almost deliberately offensive humour is a decent movie. At its best and most promising, Behaving Badly plays like an ultra-quirky, purposefully black-hearted look at the standard coming-of-age tale we've seen too many times before. But it never really knows when to dial back its strange and frequently off-putting humour, resulting in a film that frustrates as much as it amuses.

Rick (Nat Wolff) is a self-absorbed, close to morally degenerate teenager growing up in a complicated household: his boozed-up mom Lucy (Mary Louise Parker) is barely coherent from day to day, and his deadbeat dad Joseph (Cary Elwes) only stays married to avoid paying alimony. Even as he navigates a huge crush on Nina (Selena Gómez), the school's resident goody-two-shoes, he embarks on an ill-advised affair with the sexually voracious Pamela (Elisabeth Shue), mom to his strange best friend Billy (Lachlan Buchanan).

The film is every bit as complicated and filthy as its title suggests, its characters dealing in drugs, alcohol and sex with next to no moral compunction. Actually, that's not its problem. These scenes are riddled with a grim humour, and work best when played loudly and ridiculously - as they frequently are. And so there are moments when Rick receives counselling from Saint Lola, the patron saint of aimless teenagers (played in a neat Oedipal twist by Parker); or when he must cut a deal with slimy strip-club boss Jimmy (Dylan McDermott) to score backstage passes for a Josh Groban concert. The film is almost brave in how determinedly it sinks into the most depraved of narrative depths.

But it's hard to shake the feeling that writer-director Tim Garrick lets his own crazy creation get the best of him. He packs the film with knowing, self-aware touches - Rick frequently speaks straight to the camera, as the title character did in iconic teen flick Ferris Bueller's Day Off - but achieves very little in the way of emotional payoff and insight. As a result, when his deliberately peculiar film heads down the road to redemption, it pretty much collapses on itself. It's hard to believe in any of Garrick's characters making good, when they've otherwise been portrayed as so horribly bad that they barely register as real human beings.

At least Garrick's cast seems to be in on the joke. Wolff is an affable if somewhat opaque lead, largely outshone by Buchanan (delightfully weird) and the adult actors - all of whom seem to be only too pleased to have been let off the leash and told to behave, well, pretty much as badly as they like. Parker, Shue and McDermott, in particular, play the taboo-happy comedy with relish, committing so fearfully to their parts that watching them in action becomes part of the joy of the film.

It's unfortunate, then, that they're doing such good work in so awkward a movie. Behaving Badly is not for the faint of heart or morally conservative, for a start. But even those who are willing to take a walk on the wild side with their teen raunch-coms will find themselves disappointed by the film, which flirts tantalisingly with the dark side but winds up being both too strange and too predictable to really work in the end.

Rick's life has gotten complicated. I couldn't even begin to explain what has happened. The list of events just came at me too fast to keep up.

Almost no one in this movie has morals. But Rick is basically a good kid and Nina has no reason to reject him. I'm not familiar with Nat Wolff but he has an appeal similar to the teenage Scott Baio and Ben Feldman of "Superstore". Occasionally he talks to the camera. He's actually quite good but not the standout.

Selena Gomez is really cute and does a capable job as Nina.

Mary-Louise Parker has to be the standout, but not for the reasons I thought. As I look at the credits I realize there is one character I thought was someone else. But first, Parker does a great job as constantly drunk Lucy, and then she makes appearances as Saint Lola, a fantasy character only Rick can see. But there were actually two saints, so I can't say for sure who did what.

Heather Graham as Annette, whose skirts are entirely too short and who shows off too much cleavage, is not believable as a lawyer, so I assumed she was one of Kristen's stripper friends. Later, it's clear she is really who she says. Still, a good performance.

I've liked Elisabeth Shue since she was a teenage baby sitter. Here, she is definitely all grown up. She's good enough as the promiscuous Pamela but also appears as one of the saints only Rick can see. I'm assuming that she's the one who was not only gorgeous but also quite naughty. But I thought there was just one.

Gary Busey looked familiar, but I didn't know his name until the credits. Busey is the only actor with a blooper reel during those credits, and I suppose it's worth seeing). He seems quite old for a uniformed officer but he's still quite tough.

We also hear occasional announcements from and get a couple of scenes with the uptight Principal Poole, portrayed as only Patrick Warburton can nearly every time we see this man on screen in whatever movie or TV series.

Even though there is so much bizarre comedy, there is a tender and sad moment. Since the imdb credits show photos, I can conclude that the fine performance in this scene comes from Carlease Burke, who has a Caribbean accent of some kind.

Have I made it clear this movie is not family-friendly? I hope so. I can't even begin to imagine what was bleeped out, and what made it to TV is pretty bad too. One man is washing dishes and these include something which is blurred. However, I suspect things may not be as bad as they seem because a nun who took a vow of silence was given special permission to speak so she could teach Latin. This was necessary so she wouldn't go to (bleep). You can't say that? No wonder so many words are missing. But from what I could tell this movie was hilarious.

If you can get through it, I think you'll be rewarded.

The movie itself might not have made it over a 4 or a 5 rating, if it weren't for the cast! I mean Mary Louise Parker, Heather Graham and Elisabeth Shue (!) on one side ... Cary Elwes, Dylan McDermott and Jason Lee on the other. Oh and a bonus Gary Busey just for good measure. I was almost blown away just seeing those guys on screen (some in different roles).

Our main protagonist could've used a bit more ... a bit more everything actually. While the talking fast and making quick jokes does work in the movies favor most of the time, it might get tiresome for most pretty quickly. Still the script must have had something (or the producer/casting director had good connections) to attract all that talent to be involved with this. Oh yeah Selena Gomez is in this too - in case you love/hate her, therefor watch everything/nothing she's in ... A bit premature and juvenile (maybe more than a bit), this still can be entertaining at times