This Vengeful Mean Girl Teen Movie Is a Delicious Delight
The best praise for Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's savagely delicious "Do Revenge" is that it belongs with the numerous classic teen films that it both honors and borrows from. in first glance, the plot—which centers on two adolescent girls who decide to get revenge on one other's rivals—sounds like "Strangers on a Train" in an upscale private school. However, that viewpoint is overly basic. Ultimately, Robinson's endeavor owes more to films like "Heathers," "Mean Girls," and "Cruel Intentions" than it does to Hitchock's notorious classic—influences that the movie freely displays on its chic and suitably retro Y2K-era sleeves.
That would be Drea. At the start of the film, she’s on top of the world. She may be a scholarship kid but she doesn’t let on that she wasn’t born into the wealth and privilege she navigates so well. Not only is she a role model, she’s a much-dreaded Alpha. She’s got stellar grades. A killer wardrobe. A hunk of a boyfriend (Max, played by “Euphoria”’s Austin Abrams). A popular posse. And, most importantly, a surefire path to her dream future at Yale. Yet no sooner has Mendes’ voice over let us know just how carefully curated Drea’s life truly is (and how swiftly she’s willing to wield her status against those who’d cross her) than we see her fall from grace. A leaked sex tape turns her into a pariah just in time for summer vacation. And so, while her erstwhile friends gallivant to Europe, she’s stuck working at a tennis camp. At least it gives her time to lick her wounds and plan her comeback.
Let Eleanor in. Eleanor is dowdy and reserved, while Drea is impeccably put together (kudos to costume designer Alana Morshead, who was obviously having a blast dressing these disparate adolescent girls as if they were staging a late-'90s indie editorial spread). Eleanor, who is once again burdened with awkward voiceover to help the story flow, and Drea click when she introduces herself and, it seems, unintentionally establishes the main idea of the movie: Why wouldn't they assist each other in making amends with people who have wronged them?
Couldn’t Eleanor worm her way into Max’s inner circle and make him pay for leaking her sex tape, an accusation the “accidental feminist” adamantly denies? And couldn’t Drea stage a hit on that “crunchy lesbian” who, as Eleanor tells is, outed and humiliated a young Eleanor while at summer camp several years prior?
The film’s tongue may be planted squarely in its cheek but it still recognizes the lurid pleasures to be had in a well-deployed pop-culture reference. Add in the requisite makeover-to-get-the-popular-girls-to-like-you montage, a titillating closeup of a croquet mallet during a pivotal scene, a Fat Boy Slim needle-drop that’ll have you wondering whether “Bittersweet Symphony” will also make the cut — not to mention the presence of Sarah Michelle Gellar herself — and you’ve got the makings of an instantly quotable classic.
With a late-in-the-film twist that’s best left unspoiled and a thematic throughline about why we’re so eager and so comfortable vilifying (and in turn glorifying) such villainy in teenage girls, “Do Revenge” is a frothy delight. It’s no accident its most affecting scene is set to Billie Eillish’s disarming and ironically-titled tune “Happier Than Ever.” Almost functioning like a distillation of Robinson’s film, Eillish’s song begins like a wounded confession and eventually roars itself into a rancorous cacophony, capturing the plights and slights of teenage heartbreak and despair. Song and film alike ask you to lose yourself in such raw emotion — to excuse, even, the intentionally playful grammar faux-pas in its title and to revel instead, in its ultimately winking moral of a tale.
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