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Breaking the Girls DVD Review

  • Actors: Agnes Bruckner, Madeline Zima
  • Director: Jamie Babbit
  • Format: Color, NTSC, Widescreen
  • Language: English
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Rated: Unrated
  • Studio: MPI HOME VIDEO
  • DVD Release Date: November 19, 2013
  • Run Time: 87 minutes


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            I hated this movie. I hated it so much that I repeatedly stopped watching it out of anger at the filmmaker for assuming such a low-level of stupidity from the audience that nearly every sequence is flawed from every possible aspect considered. The basic plot is asinine and unoriginal, the dialogue is atrociously bad, the characters are poorly developed with no continuity to their behavior and actions, and the way every single scene is framed, shot and edited made me want to take the disc out of my player and eat it just so that I would be able to vomit this piece of shit out in a toilet where it belongs. Because it is worth saying one more time; I hated this movie.

     

            The plot hardly seems worth describing, because all logic is thrown out the window in order to make events occur within each scene and in the grander scheme of the narrative. There is hardly a believable moment in the entire film, from the manner with which characters are killed to the absolute lack of police work done by detectives investigating them. This film makes Wild Things look like a masterpiece. Compared to this film, Throw Mama From the Train was a brilliant adaptation of the Strangers on a Train narrative. Even worse is the film’s attempt to cash in on lesbian fantasies, while making villains out of the film’s homosexuals and heroes out of the heterosexuals. Director Jamie Babbit made a humorous profound statement with But I’m Cheerleader, but destroys all of that work with the impressively tactless screenplay by Mark Distefano and Guinevere Turner.

     

            I still haven’t gotten around to the plot, because it is easy to get caught up talking about all of the offensively bad elements of filmmaking. At the core of the film is an idea which is not terrible, likely because it resembles the storyline used in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stranger’s on a Train, in which two strangers agree to carry out each other’s murders. This plan works because they are strangers, so there is no connection to the victim. In Breaking the Girls the two characters agreeing to carry each other’s murders out aren’t strangers at all. They are friends, lovers and even roommates, which doesn’t provide them with the same airtight alibi hoped for in previous incarnations of this tale. Agnes Bruckner stars as the protagonist, though her actions never seem coherent enough to warrant any type of sympathy or understanding. To make matters worse, Bruckner is getting a bit too old to convincingly play college age. Madeline Zima (“Californication”) plays the only role she knows how to play, as the seductive villain. It is all very tiring and unnecessary, and none of it is as sexy as the cover art and premise would have you believe. There is more nudity in a Miley Cyrus music video than this so-called erotic thriller.

     

            The DVD features include interviews and a trailer. The only thing giving this film a score of one under Quality of Filmmaking is the fact that the camera is in focus and the film is well lit. And the actors do seem committed to the story, despite any missing logic in their behavior from one scene to the next.

     

           

    Entertainment Value: 1/10

    Quality of Filmmaking: 1/10

    Historical Significance: 0/10

    Disc Features: 2/10

     

     

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