Pretty Persuasion: Critic Reviews

The movie wants so badly to be mentioned in the same breath as Heathers or Election that it's not even funny. Really, I mean it, this charred-black comedy is not even funny.

Any satire worth its salt should not be afraid to offend, and Pretty Persuasion flings mud in all directions with a fearless audacity.

Pretty Persuasion considers itself snarky black comedy, one of those self-consciously 'outrageous' artifacts that means to shock even as it amuses.

Populated by characters that are either over-the-top cartoonish or drawn with all the depth of stick figures, there is only one reason to watch this latest entry in the high-school-as-Dante's-ring genre -- Evan Rachel Wood.

Self-conscious, overdone, shallow, and just not up to the level of its star.

A hand grenade lobbed at no place in particular.

Pretty Persuasion sets out to be a social critique but settles for smug disdain.

The screenplay by Skander Halim falters. It's too convoluted and cloudy to have the intended effect.

Pretty Persuasion is a nasty piece of work. Yet it offers some unvarnished and amusing thoughts about American contradictions.

Wood does flip cynicism with such precise, easy rhythms and with such obvious pleasure in naughtiness that she's impossible to hate.

The material in Pretty Persuasion needed to be handled as heavy drama, or played completely for comedy, and by trying to have it both ways, the movie has it neither way.

Unlike Heathers and Election -- both brilliant satires because they exaggerate reality, magnify and darken the truth -- Pretty Persuasion is not funny because it's not true.

Leaves no gender, race, class or religion untouched in its scabrous effort to show how cruel humans can be. But it also leaves viewers with no one at all to like, or believe.

Everything reminds you of some other movie.

An exercise in bad taste that takes itself just seriously enough to be offensive.

Pretty Persuasion is so exploitative and misogynistic that its last-minute dramatic turns and pleas for tolerance and understanding come off as manipulative as its heroine.

Good writing aside, this screenplay contained the elements of two different films. One of them might have been quite persuasive.

Extremely well written in the fearless way of a smarty pants on a roll in the university cafeteria.

Reminds me of a half-hour TV series that has a great pilot episode, then falls apart in subsequent installments.

Too broadly played to achieve its dark satirical aspirations and too downright silly to pass for a serious commentary on contemporary society.

Too flip to be serious and too smug to be rousing.

The film is as disturbing as it is amusing, reveling in the hypocrisy of its hopelessly dysfunctional world.