All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

It gets half a point for making the kills feel personal and ugly. These aren’t kills to revel in; they’re painful, the product of someone wanting to make sure their victim’s final moments are torturous. Beyond that, this movie is an unbelievable and comprehensive failure. On a technical level, this thing is a travesty. Random slow motion and freeze frames because someone found the effects options in Final Cut Pro. Cinematography that makes the Zapruder film look like Jurassic Park. The editing is so chaotic and disjointed, it may have been cut with a meat grinder. Every aspect of the visual presentation is obnoxious and amateurish. The soundtrack is a random playlist of forgettable pop garbage that never fits the moment. And when the music exists in the movie world, I never believe that these kids listen to this music. As a slasher movie, it is both too clever and too stupid for its own good. By process of elimination and deductive reasoning, any viewer with an IQ north of absolute zero will know who the killer is and their motivation, but the movie will play keep away because it thinks it needs to be Prom Night or the original Friday the 13th. When it gets around to the big twist at the end, it is telegraphed with the subtlety of a scoreboard at a football game. It wants to ape classic slasher movies without actually putting in the work. But it also misses the point of a slasher movie, which is to present gory and creative kills en route to a final showdown between the killer and the final survivor. Because the kills are so basic and driven by hatred, there’s no visceral catharsis for the audience. We’re watching people die scared and with great suffering. So that extra half star comes with the caveat that the kills break the movie’s very foundation. The supporting cast? They’re the worst mid 2000’s tropes. Abrasive, self-absorbed, overly vulgar, hopelessly narcissistic, and cruel to one another. They argue constantly, and since they’re all jerks, the viewer can’t side with anyone. And because this movie drags out the slasher portion for so long, the viewer is stuck with these people. And they have SO MANY POINTLESS CONVERSATIONS, and argue so much, and they all just want to screw each other or screw with each other, and it’s just unbearably terrible. There’s no relief when they’re picked off, because they suffer on the way to death. Besides, it isn’t until very late that they know they’re getting whittled down, so for most of the time, one person dies and the rest of this trash fire of a friend group keeps chugging along as just a smaller trash fire. And then there’s Mandy. Hooboy, we’ve got some stuff to unpack here. Mandy’s presentation is A Lot. On the one hand, the camera ogles her body when she wears anything that shows off her figure, which is most of the time, so she’s a sex symbol. Not often is the Final Girl treated as a sex symbol, but here we are. Mandy is played by Amber Heard, who is undeniably an physically attractive young woman here (I will not be touching her public image in this review), and that’s important, because that is not only a key aspect of Mandy, it is one of only two character traits she has. Mandy is treated as so hot, so perfect, not only does every boy in school want her, every girl understands why their boyfriends want her, because they revere her and see her as their physical and social better. She is treated like Jesus with C-cups here. Other attractive girls actually defer to her with their words, saying she’s prettier and lusting after her. Mandy’s other key feature is she’s a virgin, which only served to amplify her appeal to the boys; not only is she smoking hot, getting with her means bragging rights. And that sums up Mandy. There is nothing else to her. She isn’t catty or jealous, she isn’t demure or shy, she isn’t a tease, we don’t know if she has any aspirations or dreams or anything whatsoever in her. All we know for 90% of the movie is she looks like the girl next door became a porn star, and that makes her the most important person at school. I’ve seen some people say this informs the movie, that it is a slasher about the male gaze; she has nothing to her because all the boys are seeing what they want to see in her. And that’s some smartest-guy-in-the-room BS, for two reasons. One, none of the boys see anything but a virgin to deflower. They don’t see a girlfriend, a life partner, or an intellectual equal; she’s the ultimate notch on a belt, nothing more. There is no imposing of an image. Second, THE GIRLS WORSHIP HER TOO. This can’t be about the male gaze, because she’s given just as much reverence by the other girls around as she is the boys. Again, if this is about the male gaze, that ignores literally half the cast. And she’s not an audience surrogate, because … well … **SPOILER ALERT** she’s the mastermind of the murders. The killer has been her partner, a friend that has a crush on her (because EVERYBODY loves Mandy in this world). No, Mandy is kept a vacuous nothing because it’s more convenient for the last minute, unearned twist. I’ll at least give the movie credit that the signs are there for you to track after the fact. But then the movie pivots with the motive; Mandy and the killer were working together in a murder-suicide pact that she reneges on at the last minute, because she’s a cold blooded, manipulative, bloodthirsty lunatic. Except, she didn’t have to have the personality of a park bench for the twist to work; it could’ve all been a front. Nope. All The Boys can’t work on that conceptual level. She’s empty as a character because she just is. And this doesn’t even touch on how the movie treads right up to the line of coming off like a slasher version of the two Columbine murderers. They plotted out their massacre and had no intentions of getting out alive, and that’s the plan here. The revelation feels tacky and exploitative. I hoped this would be some hidden gem, a movie where I saw something in it others didn’t. Barring that, I hoped for some 2000’s version of the trashy D-level slasher cash-in movies like The Mutilator, with slick, Abercrombie & Fitch models getting picked off in hyper-violent fashion. All The Boys doesn’t do any other that. It suffocates itself with a terrible cast, abysmal filmmaking, a thorough misunderstanding of the mechanics of the genre, and an insulting attempt to outsmart its audience with a premise too stupid for an episode of Silk Stalkings.