Product: Kids (1995)
Rating: 1.0
Conventional, boring, unrealistic
Where to begin? This movie is an overrated load of nonsense living off nothing but hype. Conventional, boring, and unrealistic. Why? Let's tick off the reasons.Conventional-- Wow, teenage nihilism. Like we haven't seen this before. Is there anyone under the age of 80 who's really shocked to find out that teenagers are having sex and taking drugs? This stuff has been going on since the Beatniks in the 1950s. "Kids" presents nothing particularly disturbing compared to earlier movies, like "West Side Story" [What does it say that a 50's musical has almost as much edge as this movie?], "Clockwork Orange", "Colors", and "Menace 2 Society". The worst violence here is a brief, gang-style beating of another kid. Hey, go rent "Children of the Corn", made ten years earlier, and watch 13-year-old kids slitting people's throats.Boring-- The "plot" about Jennie trying to find Telly consists of almost nothing but Jennie wandering around saying "I need to find Telly" over and over again. In-between, we're treated to painfully-long, pointless, and mind-numbing "dialogue" that literally goes nowhere. I understand that this is supposed to be the point, but why do we have to watch 90 minutes of it? I got the message after about five.Unrealistic-- "Kids" does not have a single drop of racial tension. I was in high school only a couple of years before this movie was made, and admittedly I didn't live in New York, but in San Diego at least, among the young, dumb, and violent, things were generally divided along racial lines. There was more mixing than in our parents' generation, yes, but still not a whole lot. "Kids" is supposedly a gritty and unflinching view of youth, and at the same time it tries to pretend that teenagers are living in some wonderful color-blind utopia. I half-expected the cast to start skipping down the street singing "It's A Small World After All".If it's any sort of plus, I agree with the reviewer who said that this movie might be good for high school sex-education classes. It IS better than the usual educational movie, slightly. For everyone else, you'll never get back the ninety minutes of life you wasted watching this movie. Don't say you weren't warned.