Review: Mean Creek

When a bully (Josh Peck) won’t stop tormenting him, young Rory Culkin turns to his older brother (Trevor Morgan) for help. Along with some buddies (Scott Mechlowicz and Ryan Kelley), and the girl Culkin is crushing on (Carly Schroeder), they decide to teach Peck a lesson in a non-violent way. They invite Peck on a boat trip designed to humiliate him, but with a ruse that it’s actually Culkin’s birthday (Why would Culkin invite his tormentor to a birthday celebration, however?). Unfortunately, the prank goes wrong, someone dies, and everyone else is left to deal with the consequences of their actions.

 

Bullying is a very serious and important topic to address, so it’s a shame that this 2004 film from writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes (a debutant who has failed to really do anything much since) fouls it up. It’s a disappointingly slight film that ultimately doesn’t say very much at all, despite meandering for quite a long time. It could’ve been something, if it focussed more on the serious consequences of fighting back against a bully (Personally, I think it’s the only way to deal with bullies, and yet I contradictorily think it’s always a disastrous idea. It’s a no-win situation, and in the end perhaps you just have to endure it).

 

More importantly, the bond between these characters completely failed for me. Aside from the fact that two of the characters were brothers, at no point did I buy that any of these characters would in any way, shape, or form hang out with one another. It’s truly a killer, because you’ve also got the added problem of Josh Peck’s irritating bully falling for the idea that these people want to be his friend. I couldn’t buy them being friends with each other let alone believed that Peck would fall for their ruse. He comes across as monumentally dense, and that’s well before he has his uncontrollable bout of verbal diarrhoea. I guess Mechlowicz and Kelley were friends with Morgan and not so much Culkin, but if that’s the case, I felt it odd that the others would go to these lengths to help Culkin. For Morgan, it’s more believable, because it’s his brother, but what, were they just doing Morgan a favour? I also felt Kelley in particular still didn’t seem like the kind of kid who would hang out with Morgan and particularly Mechlowicz. I dunno, the set-up just didn’t work for me, and that ruined the rest of it too. I mean, there’s ragtag and then there’s ‘no way in hell are these people all friends’.

 

I also take serious issue with the camerawork by Sharon Meir, specifically the stylistic choice of using hand-held cameras. Just because Peck likes to make videos, it isn’t enough to excuse the entire film adopting this approach. I mean, this film shows off some really nice scenery, but only on the few occasions when Meir hasn’t handed the camera over to a Parkinson’s sufferer. This isn’t a documentary, nor a first-person narrative, so why does it look like one? It’s distracting and ugly.

 

That said, there isn’t a bad performance in the film, with Josh Peck (especially), Carly Schroeder, and Scott Mechlowicz being the standouts. As soon as you see Peck, you just know he’s not a one-dimensional bad kid who does what he does simply because he can. He’s clearly got his own issues, and in any other social setting he’d even be the one being victimised (and eventually is, I guess). You want to kill him and rescue him at the same time, like Piggy in “Lord of the Flies”. Everyone will know or have known someone like this kid. You might’ve even been him yourself. However, “The River’s Edge” this ain’t. It’s far too slight and hard to swallow at times, and it rambles for far too long at the beginning.

 

Rating: C