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It’s rare to watch TV these days without feeling a hint of deja vu, and nowhere is this more evident than with teen drama. Not content with a needless Gossip Girl revival, the YA entertainment gods have been making their way through old films for inspiration, from Scream to I Know What You Did Last Summer. The latest cult 90s classic they have decided to “reimagine” is Cruel Intentions, itself based on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses from 1782.
The original film, of course, starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe as too-close-for-comfort step siblings Kathryn and Sebastian, whose lust for one another is outdone only by their love of troublemaking, as they callously toy with the love lives of ingenues Cecile and Annette (Selma Blair and Reese Witherspoon). Fast forward to 2024, and the action moves from Manhattan to Washington DC, where protagonists Caroline and Lucien terrorise their peers at the elite Manchester College – interspersed with the odd bit of almost-incest for old times’ sake.
Shifting Cruel Intentions from a high school to university setting means adding a staple of American college – Greek life, with its clandestine societies and risky initiation rituals – and Cruel Intentions 2.0 can’t get enough of it. Caroline (Sarah Catherine Hook) is the head of the Delta Phi sorority, which more or less exists to psychologically torture other students while trying to scam fresh-faced ingenues (can you see where this is going?) into joining its perfectly blow-dried ranks. Luckily, like the Sarah before her, when the going gets tough, Caroline has a semester’s worth of cocaine stashed in her rosary.
Meanwhile, Lucien (Zac Burgess) is the treasurer of the Alpha Gamma fraternity, where sex, drugs and financial embezzlement are the order of the day. The future of Greek life, we are told, is under threat because of a perilous “hazing” incident, which it transpires was someone getting hit on the head with a can of beer. Luckily, the victim is dedicated himbo and political nepo baby Scott (Khobe Clarke), who gets the best lines in the whole show (among them, “I know how lying works – my dad’s in Congress”).
Hook and Burgess aren’t Gellar and Philippe, but they are compelling leads (Prime also appears to have picked two actors who look as if they have been genetically modified to resemble two other 90s icons, Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger). Burgess is a delight in particular, managing to retain Lucien’s sense of barely concealed mania even while delivering hammy double entendres such as: “there’s nothing better than a good bang”, as he inspects a classmate’s new fringe.
Neighbours alumnus John Harlan Kim also proves that Ramsay Street remains a finishing school for some of TV’s best actors, taking on the role of Janus-faced frat boy Blaise with a thrilling mix of icy detachment and desperate insecurity. Also working overtime is Savannah Lee Smith, previously seen in the Gossip Girl reboot. Her character, Annie, is a reimagining of Witherspoon’s Annette: a new Delta recruit who is swept into Caroline and Lucien’s sexually manipulative games to the sound of an Olivia Rodrigo megamix.
Had Prime stopped there, this new Cruel Intentions might have had a fighting chance. But unlike its source material, a perfect 97 minutes of thrilling eroticism and 90s anthems (The Verve! Placebo!), it just doesn’t know where to end. Because Annie isn’t only the target of Lucien’s affections, she’s also – dun, dun, dun! – the daughter of the vice-president of the United States. It’s a twist that surely even Chat GPT would have vetoed, and yet here we are. And so, our swaggering, mulleted Lothario Lucien isn’t so much caught in a game of cat and mouse with his stepsister, but with the secret service agents who tail Annie’s every move, and who really bring down the mood at freshers’ week.
In spite of my better judgment, I like the B-plot involving Caroline’s sorority deputy CeCe (Sara Silva), who brazenly channels the neurotic energy of Selma Blair’s Cecile from the original (helped, too, by the fact that their love interests are played by the same actor, Sean Patrick Thomas, who was young cello teacher Ronald in the film, and is now the not-so-young Professor Chadwick). But, really, this feels like a generic teen series by any other name. You can’t help but wonder what the writers might have come up with had they not been confined by the streaming economy’s desperate need for nostalgia, which even extends to an obligatory cover of Bitter Sweet Symphony. If you want soapy, mindless melodrama to pass the time, press play. But if you want to watch Cruel Intentions, for God’s sake, just dust off the DVD.
