Fun -

Two depressed teenagers, Hillary and Bonnie run into each other one fine spring day and the rest, as they say, is history. Two girls, fueling each other's desperate needs for validation, brutally stab an elderly woman to death just for the sake of doing it. FUN, they call it. FUN - and such a riot it was that they doze off to sleep in each others arms, blissfully recalling the most marvelous moment of their lives.

The movie begins in the juvenile detention center where the girls have just been incarcerated and we are shown the crime bit by bit through flashbacks. The poorly planned homicide gets the girls arrested in a matter of hours though they seemed to have thought they would never be suspected. Young, white teenage girls are rarely killers. They completely black out the fact they ran through the neighborhood banging on doors and pissing off the residents. They forgot they had no gloves on and left fingerprints all over the place and they forget they were seen at the gas station they ran to in order to wash the blood off of themselves in the restroom. The police take all of a few hours to find them, snuggled up in bed, dreaming of whatever little demented girls dream of, totally oblivious to reality.

The movie shunts back and forth between a social worker and a reporter, each as they work on the girls to get the truth out. Somehow the relationships between the girls and these two doesn't ever feel real or necessary and the acting of these two adults is sadly lacking. They should have left those interactions out. Bonnie, however, played by actress Alicia Witt is spectacular in her role. Anyone who wondered how Angelina Jolie got an Academy award for sorta playing herself in Girl Interrupted, will relish the job done by Witt. Of the two girls, Bonnie is the more 'lovable" one, but in the end, one realizes she is less of a candidate for rehabilitation than the less pleasant Hillary. It is unfortunate that the movie's ending leaves one a bit puzzled and let down by the suicide of Bonnie which simply does not fit her personality disorder.

So what IS the point? I am guessing the movie is aiming at the concept of dangerous liaisons; the kind of killers that are only made when their other half completes them a la Bonnie and Clyde or Bernardo and Holmoka. What is always rather interesting about this particular concept is the fact we have NO idea what would have become of these individuals had they not met. We cannot possibly assume that it is only the chance meeting of the other person that led to their demise. An individual actively seeks out their companion in crime and is willing to act out his or her part in it. "He fell in with bad companions" is a poor excuse and more likely it is the saying "Birds of a feather flock together" that is the more accurate of the two points of view.

The friendship of Bonnie and Hillary was an accident waiting to happen. Liken their meeting to that of two drunken drivers heading down the highway towards each other. Yes, they collided, but if they hadn't, each drunk driver may well have committed an accident all by herself. The movie is an interesting journey into the behaviors of the two lost and pathological girls created by the "parents" we never see once and the purposefulness of their purposeless crime is something society could well learn to recognize as a real and dangerous issue.

It really WAS fun!

Pat Brown
The Sexual Homicide Exchange

**Please rent this film from your local Video store, it is unavailable on DVD and is ridiculously expensive on VHS**