Product Description

Sarah Michelle Gellar, Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Phillippe. A high school vixen and her stepbrother plot to seduce two fellow students. 1999/color/97 min/R.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16470 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2007-06-12
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
• Dubbed in: French
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 97 minutes

Amazon.com
This modern-day teen update of Les Liaisons Dangereuses suffered at the hands of both critics and moviegoers thanks to its sumptuous ad campaign, which hyped the film as an arch, highly sexual, faux-serious drama (not unlike the successful, Oscar-nominated Dangerous Liaisons). In fact, this intermittently successful sudser plays like high comedy for its first two-thirds, as its two evil heroes, rich stepsiblings Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe), blithely ruin lives and reputations with hearts as black as coal. Kathryn wants revenge on a boyfriend who dumped her, so she befriends his new intended, the gawky Cecile (Selma Blair), and gets Sebastian to deflower the innocent virgin. The meat of the game, though, lies in Sebastian's seduction of good girl Annette (a down-to-earth Reese Witherspoon), who's written a nationally published essay entitled "Why I Choose to Wait." If he fails, Kathryn gets his precious vintage convertible; if he wins, he gets Kathryn--in the sack. When the movie sticks to the merry ruination of Kathryn and Sebastian's pawns, it's highly enjoyable: Gellar in particular is a two-faced manipulator extraordinaire, and Phillippe, usually a black hole, manages some fun as a hipster Eurotrash stud. Most pleasantly surprising of all is Witherspoon, who puts a remarkably self-assured spin on a character usually considered vulnerable and tortured (see Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liaisons). Unfortunately, writer-director Roger Kumble undermines everything he's built up with a false ending that's true to neither the reconceived characters nor the original story--revenge is a dish best served cold, not cooked up with unnecessary plot twists. --Mark Englehart

From The New Yorker
Yet another version of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," Choderlos de Laclos's stunning 1782 novel about sexual gamesmanship and betrayal. This one is set in contemporary Manhattan, among the spoiled youth of an Upper East Side private school. It's not boring (given the subject, how could it be?), but almost nothing in it works. The elaborate apparatus of sex-seductions, lies, strategic refusals-seems merely peculiar without the eighteenth-century social conventions to support it, and most of the dialogue comes off as arch. Sarah Michelle Gellar looks too old to play a scheming high-school senior, and Ryan Phillippe, as her irresistibly handsome half brother, pouts his way through his role. Only Selma Blair, as a big, goofy girl who keeps falling out of bed, shows a zest for comedy. Reese Witherspoon plays the virgin on whom Phillippe works his charms. Written and directed by Roger Kumble, who has the actors emphasize certain phrases unnaturally so as to appear knowing and vicious. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker