‘Cruel Intentions’ review: low-stakes remake doesn’t chime with the times

There have been attempts to turn Cruel Intentions into a TV series before. Shortly after the deliciously wicked 1999 film starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe, Fox ordered a 13-episode prequel featuring a pre-fame Amy Adams. This idea was quickly scrapped and the two episodes they had filmed were cobbled together to make the shoddy, direct-to-video Cruel Intentions 2.

Then in 2015 NBC made a pilot for a sequel series starring Gellar, but this was also abandoned. So this new, eight-part Cruel Intentions reboot from Amazon Prime Video is very much a case of “third time’s a charm”, even if it doesn’t have quite as much dark, depraved charm as it needs.

Co-showrunners Sara Goodman and Phoebe Fisher, who previously worked on another movie-to-TV adaptation, 2021’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, have tentatively brought Cruel Intentions into 2024.  The students at Manchester College, the fictional Washington, DC university where the series is set, are more debauched than the Manhattan high schoolers of the 1999 film. Here, there are bumps of coke at the frat house, the odd C-bomb and lots of sex getting filmed on smartphones.

There’s also more male nudity than female, which feels fitting given that a brief glimpse of Phillippe’s derrière went down in ’90s teen movie history. But in other ways, this Cruel Intentions feels retrogressive compared to many contemporary teen series. It’s predicated on a boringly binary idea of gender and casual body-shaming seems to be de rigueur. One character is told to eat “less salt” to improve the appearance of her “cankle”.

Of course, the entire point of Cruel Intentions is that it’s set in a heightened, hyper-stylised world where pretty and unbelievably privileged rich kids plot to get what they want. The 1999 film was a fiendishly clever riff on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which was scandalous at the time. The problem is that it’s hard to care about this series’ low-stakes machinations in the current, incredibly fractious political climate.

Concerned that negative publicity could threaten Delta Phi, her super-luxe sorority house, serene queen bee Caroline Merteuil (Sarah Catherine Hook, stepping into the Gellar role) challenges her louche stepbrother Lucien Belmont (Zac Burgess)  to seduce Annie Grover (Savannah Lee Smith). Sweet but naive Annie is the daughter of the Vice President Of The United States, so if she joins Delta Phi, Caroline believes positive press will follow and the sorority’s future will be assured.

This flimsy premise wouldn’t matter if Cruel Intentions offered a bit more shameless escapism. But for the most part, the dialogue is crisp and brittle without being particularly witty, and the performances are self-assured without sparkling like Delta Phi’s bottomless supply of champagne. Still, this series is stylish and sprightly enough for a lazy binge-watch, even if it never fully lives up to its spicy source material.

‘Cruel Intentions’ is out now on Amazon Prime Video

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