It?s Been 20 Years Since ?Cruel Intentions,? And There?s Never Been Another Movie Like It

Cruel Intentions, in its sheer scandalousness, blew my preteen mind.Cecile (Selma Blair) and Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar) during their kissing lesson in Central Park.“It was kind of that movie that you weren’t supposed to let your parents know you’ve seen,” Jordan Ross, the co-creator of Cruel Intentions: The Musical, said in a 2017 interview. First-time director Roger Kumble, speaking to Cosmo, remembered that Phillippe told him on set: “When you break down this movie, it’s really about me wanting to have anal sex with my sister.” It’s a dirty movie about delightfully mean teens.When Cruel Intentions was first released, Gellar said last month in an interview with ET, “We were coming out of a John Hughes era and moving into these sort of frothy, romantic comedies.” The film appealed to her because “to take material like Les Liaisons dangereuses, and give it to teens and that material — it was sort of the first of its kind.”Twenty years after its release, Cruel-style Mean Teen movies have again become rather rare, replaced by a rebooted era of Niceness: There are wholesome teen rom-coms (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before; Love, Simon) and tearjerker dramas about kids with life-ruining illnesses (The Fault in Our Stars; Everything, Everything; Five Feet Apart), including the subgenre Jezebel dubbed “Sad Teen Death Movies.” The current teen rom-com renaissance offers a lot to love — we’re slowly seeing a more diverse group of teens cast in starring roles, certainly more so than in Hughes’ time — although the most recent batch also tends to glamorize some tired tropes of the genre in attempts to critique them. And it’s nice to watch nice people win in the end.I don’t think we necessarily need more movies about filthy rich white teenagers being horrible to each other — television tends to have that area more thoroughly covered these days — but I do think it’s notable that, while a same-sex kiss is not so likely to shock anymore, Cruel Intentions doesn’t look significantly less debaucherous today than it did 20 years ago. It’s very tragic; everyone basically loses.”Adam White, in a 2017 Telegraph piece about how the film “seduced a generation,” pointed out that “in an era where even the best young adult actors were usually found playing stock roles such as The Bitchy Prom Queen or The Handsome Jock in between their tenures on teen television, Cruel Intentions offered rising stars an opportunity to prove their range.” Gellar, in particular, had reason to sign on, he wrote: “Off the back of a double bill of pretty, helpless murder victims in Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and her two-season role as Buffy Summers, Gellar was given a chance to prove she could be more than a Vampire Slayer or a doomed damsel in distress.”Dying her hair dark to distinguish herself from Buffy, Gellar gave it her all as the abominable Kathryn, someone who feels forced to act prim and prude in polite society while secretly carrying on her real life as a sex maniac and coke fiend.There’s something sort of refreshing about Kathryn’s complete lack of redeeming qualities. And that’s on the record.”)En route to destroying her ex-boyfriend Court, Kathryn will screw over Cecile, just for existing, as well as Cecile’s mother, Bunny (Christine Baranski), for being Cecile’s mother; Cecile’s music teacher, Ronald (Sean Patrick Thomas), for falling in love with Cecile; and, ultimately, her stepbrother Sebastian, for falling in love with someone else.What muddies Cruel Intentions’ moral waters is that most of the people who get screwed over kind of deserve it; everyone is so hideously flawed that whoever we’re supposed to be rooting for at any given time is never in our favor for long. Kumble has said that Witherspoon only agreed to join the project if she could work with him on the script to strengthen her role, “so she wasn’t a doormat.” Annette stands up to Sebastian initially, but in typical teen-movie fashion, it just takes a couple dates — with someone she’s been warned is a master manipulator — to believe that he’s truly changed, abandoning her pledge to abstinence and her longtime boyfriend in one fell swoop. It’s hard to imagine how much of a pushover Annette’s character was before Witherspoon insisted on giving her some autonomy.Annette (Reese Witherspoon) and Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe).To be fair, it seems the audience is also supposed to believe that Sebastian has truly changed — he passes on his first opportunity to sleep with a consenting Annette, which would have won him his bet with Kathryn; instead, he tears up and leaves the room, suddenly struck by a new conscience. The hourlong drama, which culled characters from the movie, following them at their elite Manhattan prep school — a proto–Gossip Girl — got the ax before it even aired; Fox cited “creative differences” with the studio, Columbia TriStar.“Just as Cruel Intentions was criticized for being a teen-friendly R-rated movie,” wrote Joal Ryan for E! A scene from the R-rated film that involved two girls kissing now takes place between a boy and a girl.” But then the Parents Television Council got word of an Entertainment Tonight exposé, in which cameras “caught the series filming a scene where one girl shows another how to get sexual pleasure from horseback riding.” It was all downhill from there.Amy Adams as young Kathryn in Cruel Intentions 2.Kumble cut the dumped series into a direct-to-video movie, launching the screen career of one Amy Adams, but neither Cruel Intentions 2 nor several of the other Cruel Intentions spinoffs after it were able to capture the same mania of the original.