Bilgi :For three weeks, 14-year-old Hayley Stark has been chatting on-line with 'Lensmaster319', a 32-year old fashion photographer, named Jeff. The two agree to meet at a coffee shop called Nighthawks. They hit it off, despite the massive age difference. Hayley appears to flirt with Jeff, and Jeff generally restrains himself, even admitting that he must wait 4-years until he can be with her. But his reservations are apparently not enough to decline when Hayley all but invites herself over to his house. Once at the house, manipulation becomes the name of the game, and the pedophile seems to be on the non-traditional side of it.
Review:"Hard Candy" is a visceral revenge flick destined to play the chaotic midnight shows at art houses for years to come.
That's a compliment, and an insult.
Midnight movies are usually half-serious, half-goofy adrenaline rides best accompanied by a buzz beyond the Milk Dud variety. They also contain some seriously reprehensible attributes that with age can become part of the movies' charm, allowing willfully arrested adolescents to proclaim defiance of good taste.
Art houses the nation over, clear your late-night calendars. "Hard Candy" is tantalizing, brutal, fetishistic, gripping and exhausting, with plenty of moments for movie patrons to shout advice at the screen. That's not to say it's a great movie, or even a good one. I may have to be on something stronger than Milk Duds myself to make that final conclusion.
We first meet perky, precocious and consciously nymphlike Hayley (Ellen Page) online. Age 14, she types away at a keyboard just like your teenage kids in your worst nightmares, arranging to meet a much older guy.
Enter Jeff (Patrick Wilson) at a coffee shop, where he wipes chocolate from her lip with his finger and continues the predator's dance. Hayley agrees to drive back to his secluded house ... but there is more than our surface discomfort here. Hayley is far too smart for this. What's going on?
When Jeff collapses from a drug-laced drink, and Hayley is standing over his tightly bound body, the other shoe drops. And it's a stiletto with razor heels and barbed-wire laces. Furious Hayley wants retribution for Jeff's alleged offenses. She is convinced he's the animal who abducted, raped and killed a girl she knows, and she's determined to find his stash of kiddie porn before dispatching him.
I can't give away more secrets for fear of ruining "Hard Candy" for determined masochists; rest assured that Hayley's version of revenge is extreme, offense-specific and involves surgical instruments.
Plus, there's a Taser.
What attraction there is in the often tough-to-watch "Hard Candy" rests largely with Page. She is tireless and terrifying, firing off her flirtations as comfortably as she handles the gun she finds under Jeff's bed. Page is Lolita at age 14, if Lolita had spent four years training with the Mossad.
First-time feature director David Slade also does a nice job with the house, making it a mix of the poseur and the suburban shlub suddenly transformed by the presence of a terrorist. The claustrophobia of the setting builds as Hayley and Jeff talk-talk-talk at each other in between Taser shots.
It was no surprise Lionsgate picked up "Hard Candy" for its shot at national distribution. Before gaining respectability with "Crash," Lionsgate specialized in horror and other genre movies, taking on "difficult" projects. It scored a big success with "Open Water" two summers ago, somehow making compelling drama out of two abandoned scuba divers slowly taken apart by sharks.
You could say "Hard Candy" is another shark movie, a celebration of wily attackers where you need a scorecard to tell predator from prey. "Hard Candy" is a jaw-dropper, and for many people, a jawbreaker. |
