Extracurricular Activities

 

Reagan Collins is a boring kid who doesn't own a cell phone, does his homework, does charity work, and seems dull as dishwater. He's also a twisted genius who masterminds murders for sale, getting rid of parents who are terrible people. I think the fact that he refuses to kill unless the parents are really bad people who have a negative impact on their kids and the world around them is supposed to build audience sympathy for him, but honestly the character comes off as so stiff and unlikeable this doesn't really work. But the fact that it doesn't work, actually works better for the movie as a whole.

The reason? His antagonist, a cop who is the only one in town who sees through his facade. But even though the cop is right, he is also not terribky likeable. We see him perving over cheerleaders at a high school sporting event. He is pretty douchy to his own kid. he's willing to go to extremes, not in the name of justuice, but just to prove that he's right and thus a better cop than his peers. And that is what makes the movie interesting, that there is an almost complete lack of likeable characters. A possible excption is the girl that becomes Reagan's love interest, but the main personality trait she has is her inexplicable attraction to Reagan.

They could have played it to make us sympathetic to the kids liberated from their terrible parents, this putting us more firmly on Reagan's side. But instead most of the kids come across as even worse than their parents. So you end up following a battle of wits between two people and not really being fully invested in either. This allows an out for emotional agnosticism in a movie where one of the two main characters is a serial killer for hire. This in turn allows you to sit back and enjoy the turns as the situation escalates and seems to get more and more out of hand.

Now I will admit that the final "twist" may be one you guess pretty early on. But there are still boulkd to be some surprises in how it actually plays out. And while we might not like anyone involved, the acting is good enough to keep us engrossed. It's a movie that I feel owes a lot to crime movies of the 90's, so fans of earlt Tarantino and Bryan Singer (before he deviated into mid to bad superhero fare) will enjoy this. To put it in high school terms of the movie's setting, I give it a solid B plus.