Crush Review
by Steve Rhodes (Steve DOT Rhodes AT InternetReviews DOT com)April 22nd, 2002
CRUSH
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2002 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): **
Often when something is called a "chick flick," the label is little more than a euphemism for a mediocre movie starring a group of women. So it is with CRUSH, written and directed by John McKay, a movie that could have been given a title like FOUR FUNERALS AND A WEDDING.
You've seen this story a hundred times before. A group of one sex, women in this case, argue that there aren't enough good people of the opposite sex over the age of fill-in-the-blank. The age in question this time is forty. Andie MacDowell (FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL), as a school headmistress named Kate, spends much of her life swapping "man stories" with her girlfriends, Janine (Imelda Staunton) and Molly (Anna Chancellor).
Janine tells of the time that she got into a cab at a party, not realizing that it wasn't actually a cab but a stranger's car. Frightened, she demanded that the driver stop the car. Afterwards, she jumped out and ran off into the woods, screaming in the dead of night. Since she is a police chief, you'd think that she wouldn't scare so easily.
Molly, a doctor, relates the incident of a first date who embarrassed her by having a heart attack in a restaurant. She gave him CPR on a table right in the middle of the dinning room floor, causing quite a commotion. Molly thinks that one of her problems is her attitude toward men. "When I get a whiff of a man, I go all Stravinsky, when I should go classic FM," she tells Kate and Janine. The script not only never creates plausible characters, it has trouble even devising believable dialog.
It falls to Kate to come up with the most shocking story. "I had sex with a 25-year-old yesterday on a tombstone," she tells her girlfriends of her love affair with Jed (Kenny Doughty), an ex-student of hers who currently works at a crematorium and as a funeral organist. The chemistry between Kate and Jed is non-existent, even if the music constantly suggests otherwise. And no matter how many times they just barely escape being discovered by passers-by while having intercourse, they never have a genuinely erotic moment.
How fake is this story? At one point, Molly looks over at Kate and says, "I can smell man on you." Tell me, women. Would you ever say that to another woman? I didn't think so. Well, the male writer of this film thinks that you would. Why don't you drop him a line and straighten him out.
CRUSH runs too long at 1:52. It is rated R for "sexuality and language" and would be acceptable for most teenagers.
The film is playing in nationwide release now in the United States. In the Silicon Valley, it is showing at the AMC and the Century theaters.
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