"Girls Against Boys" - Film Review

Rape is something I’m not totally comfortable discussing. I once wrote an essay of nearing 2,000 words on rapes depiction in pop culture. I never published it here or in any other place because I knew I was balancing something really tricky; that I was delving into a topic that if I accidentally broached some line in how I treated it, it would make me look like an ass whether I meant to or not, and, well, I didn’t want to take that chance. Now, I wasn’t be a douchebag about the topic. I was attacking all the many vicissitudes about what makes rape culture just an awful, awful thing. I wanted to write about it because I’d seen rape depicted in some shows I had been watching and the experience of watching it made me so uncomfortable and I wanted to think about why I had such a strong reaction. Depicting rape is something you have to be really sensitive about because it’s so frequently loaded when it’s part of the discourse and because you could end up being unintentionally offensive or it could off as if you’re being too slight about the subject matter.  And that’s a lengthy way of saying that the first strike against Girls Against Boys is that it treats rape as an afterthought.

Our protagonist Shae (Danielle Panabaker) is raped at one point, and the film doesn’t blame her for it, but the only reason it has the character get raped is to justify her killing spree against the men in her life who have wronged her. Did it have to be rape that led to some women getting vengeance on the men who’ve harmed them? No. I’m all for empowering women and I’m all for strong female characters who take charge and even kill a few people to serve up some revenge. But it just feels like it's purposely manipulating our sentiments so we won’t be upset at the excessive violence later, and that’s totally the wrong way to be handling rape as a subject matter. The whole rape scene preys on our emotions. Shae is sexually assaulted but briefly manages to gets away. We start rooting for her escape, and then the film exploits this so we’re that much more upset when she doesn’t and the rape does take place. 

Having done the necessary legwork, the film decides that Shae and her new chic friend Lu (Nicole LaLiberte) are going to kill people violently. What follows comes off as someone writing a film who only had a vague understanding of feminist theories. Slumber Party Massacre similarly attempted to be a feminist work (written by a feminist author and activist, Rita Mae Brown, no less) and it failed miserably because it ended up objectifying the very women it was empowering and therefore glamorized the violence towards them. The violence of Girls Against Boys is tedious, tawdry, and pointless. It’s the violence level, at times, of a Saw film with the feigned pretension that it’s high minded; at least, the Saw franchise knew it was schlock and schlocked it up like it was nobody’s business. 

Let’s say Girls Against Boys had just been a poor attempt at feminist empowerment used to ground the needless violence. That would be bad enough. It wouldn’t be the worst thing; at least it wouldn’t be straight up misogynistic which is a slight step up from a lot of junk out there. But it doesn’t just stick to this narrative. It has the relationship between Shae and Lu breakdown, and Lu suddenly has an inexplicable lesbian crush on Shae that turns her psychopathic intentions from men to Shae. Not only does this come out of nowhere, but it undermines the message of the film. 

As critic Noel Murray so perfectly described it, “Girls Against Boys is undone by [Director Austin] Chick’s apparent supposition that he’s the first filmmaker to notice how men sometimes take advantage of women, or how putting a gun in an actress’ hands can be a complicated symbol of empowerment”. It’s a movie that thinks it’s being really clever, bold, and smart, but rather is being unsubtle, boring, and occasionally borderline offensive. The film has us watching one-dimensional characters with poorly explained motivations killing people and it presumes that it’s the most original thing you ever did see. 

Grade: D-