Review: Cursed (2005)

It's a bit surprising I had not already seen this movie.  Wes Craven directed and written by Kevin Williamson, the team behind Scream, this is the exact sort of movie high school/college me would've been all about.  Maybe its poor reviews when it released kept me away?  Whatever the case, I finally got around to it 20 years later.

Thankfully (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), the movie doesn't prove to be essential viewing for any but the most diehard Craven fans.  It's a fairly average movie that might've been better had the producers (the odious Weinstein brothers) not tinkered with it: Forcing a PG-13 rating on it, having scenes rewritten and re-shot, and firing the legendary Rick Baker (who did the effects for An American Werewolf in London!) in favor of CGI that is below average even by 2005 standards.

Despite that meddling, the movie is mostly okay.  It follows siblings Jimmy and Ellie (Jesse Eisenberg and Christina Ricci) as they discover themselves to be werewolves after getting into a car wreck after hitting one. They then have to figure out who the original werewolf is to break the curse.

It's a fairly by-the-numbers story that I think is really undercut by the forced PG-13 rating.  Some more appropriate swearing and some better kills might not have made this great, but it certainly would've made the thin characterizations and thin plot more forgivable.  The best scene of the movie is also the only one that really gives it any personality, so it's a shame to see it constrained in such a way.

That scene, where bully Bo (Milo Ventimiglia) apologizes to Jimmy and then comes out and comes on to him, is deeply funny and both Eisenberg and Ventimiglia play it just straight enough (no pun intended) to really bring out the chuckles.   The movie takes the cowards way out by having Jimmy end up with Brooke (Kristina Anapau) rather than allowing a main character to be gay, but I will give the movie credit for keeping Bo alive to the end and having him end up friends with Jimmy.

Ricci is given far less interesting material to work with, and while she is very good at spinning gold from weaker dialogue, it ultimately defeats her here.  Most of her scenes are opposite Michael Rosenbaum, who is very much phoning it in, or Joshua Jackson, who feels like he is playing three different characters spliced together to make a single one in the final cut.

Really, this movie is missed potential.  There's the nugget of something interesting here, but too much personality has been removed for the movie to be anything other than okay.

5.5 out of 10