Boys

Patty Vare (Winona Ryder) hurts herself falling off of a horse. Prep school students Murphy and Cooke find her unconscious and tell older kid John Baker Jr (Lukas Haas). Baker brings her to his dorm after she refused hospital or going home. Rumors spread that there's a girl. Officer Kellogg Curry (John C. Reilly) is investigating Patty. He's looking for a stolen car and the missing Bud Valentine (Skeet Ulrich).

First, it's not romantic to sneak an unconscious girl into your dorm room. She suffered a concussion and he doesn't get her medical treatment. It's more than creepy and not cute at all. Lukas Haas is borderline sleazy with his creepy smile. The other problem is that her secret is rather disappointing. It really needs to be some crazy murder that's she's responsible for or something at that level. It's not dark enough and this movie is definitely not romantic.

"Boys" is proof positive that two young, attractive leads, Wynona Ryder and Lukas Haas, can't always compensate for a complex, uninvolving plot. Make no mistake, Ryder and Haas are both as good as they can be, given the material, and their love scenes, particularly at the carnival, do generate a goodly ammount of heat. But, on the whole, the story is far too complex and uninvolving. By the time the central mystery is unraveled, you find yourself asking what all the fuss was about. In short, a dynamic team wasted on a trite picture.

I liked this movie. Imagine a teenager, named John, the typical guy who goes to the last year of high school and doesn't quite know what to do with his life. Then, one day, he finds a beautiful woman lying on the floor in a field who, apparently, is on the run for something she did and takes her to his room. It's a boarding school, he might get kicked out, but he doesn't care; he just wants to help her. The look on his face when the woman first wakes up and the teenager walks towards her, is the first sign of a magical performance by Lukas Hass; it's a look that combines the excitement of having this woman in his bed and the curiosity of wanting to know what she might have done.

The woman is called Patty Vare, played by the wonderful Winona Ryder in the kind of role she knows by heart but never forgets to add new elements to. Here, besides appearing to be somewhere other than the real world (she fell off a horse before John found her and doesn't remember much), she masters the 'look'; that seductive look only she can achieve and makes anyone go crazy to the point that they would do anything for her. Well, at least that's the effect it had on John in the movie…And on me, of course.

But don't get things wrong. I personally don't think "Boys" is a romantic movie, even if it was writer/director Stacy Cochran's intention. I would call it some kind of an 'age analysis'. Yes, there are romance related moments that make you smile because Winona is an expert on the subject, but this time her character Patty is an expert too: on men. So the study the film tries to make is what can happen when a woman of Patty's experience meets a kid like John in an extreme situation.

That's why Cochran shows us flashbacks of what happened to Patty before meeting John; they're necessary for us to know the kind of woman she is. On the other hand, we don't know anything about John but the fact that he has a bad relationship with his father (a respectable Chris Cooper). But we don't need to know, because we realize when he is with Patty; when we hear what he says and see what he does.

There's a scene in the town fair, where Patty and John are together in the merry-go-round. The final moment of that scene explains why I liked this movie, and those are the scenes in the movie that work. Not the police sub-plot (led by a convincing John C. Reilly), not John's relationship with his friends at school (although some scenes are good to watch more of Hass' perfect work), not even the conflict with his father.

There's another scene really worth paying attention too: a chat in a table where a beautiful light from the window makes Patty seem so vulnerable. Luckily for us, this is a movie where we have the final world; about whether we believe the characters or not and about the inconclusive and far-fetched ending. Yes, it may not honor reality itself, but "Boys" honors its title; and I liked that. I liked this movie.

Let me begin by saying, I love Winona. I think she's great. This movie is just terrible though. It's boring, slow and forgettable. Her performance is really bad. She looks tired, bored, fed up - her heart just wasn't in this one. Compared to her *fantastic* efforts in Heathers, Mermaids, Reality Bites, Little Women et al, this is just tripe. The "romance" between her and Lukas Haas is unbelievable and awkward and there's zero chemistry, the scenes in the dormitory are boring, I just can't name any redeeming features except for the beautiful Maryland scenery. And there's a scene where there's all this Spanish being spoken and NO sub-titles. Ridiculous. I know some people enjoyed this movie and I respect that, but if you decided to see this thinking it'd be another Winona classic, forget it. Oh, and as for the "mystery" of "What's up with Patty?", well, by the time we find out, I really didn't care anymore. Sorry Winona, you CAN and HAVE done MUCH better than this. 1.5 stars (for the scenery). May be of interest to some to see Christopher Pettiet in one of his final roles before his untimely death.

"Boys" tells a flimsy story to which Cochran tries to add mystery by keeping information from the audience and revealing it piecemeal via flashback. Cheap shot. Ryder is found unconscious, after being thrown from horseback, by a boarding school student (Haas) who takes her to his room (yeah, right), instead of the obvious choice, the hospital. You know, HOSPITAL...where you take injured people for professional medical care. Duh. Anyway, this dumbassed flick has a list of negatives too long to go into here. File "Boys" in the boys room and don't forget to flush. (D)