Disturbing Behavior 

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Director: David Nutter
Cast: Jimmy Marsden, Katie Holmes, Nick Stahl, Ethan Embry, Bruce Greenwood

Okay, I've got a bone to pick with this one, and it doesn't even have the courtesy to be an easy bone to explain. Y'see, I just got back from the press screening of "Disturbing Behavior," and it left me with the sort of taste in your mouth you get after ingesting a whole pack of Starburst. That oily, petroleum by-product feeling.

"Behavior" is basically a trendy Gen-X variation on a Stepford Wives theme; an otherwise idyllic small town in some Switzerland-lookin' part of America has a problem with their wayward teens, and one of the school guidance counselors thinks he has a solution. A gaggle of "perfect citizens" called the Blue Ribbon Club take over the baddies like the black oil in the X-files—pretty soon, half the student body walks around in the white bread delirium of disinfected, scrubbed-clean kids with no cavities. Problem is, they all have tempers and start beating the crap out of people who aren't in the Club.

Of course, the new kid in town (James Marsden) watches all of this with great curiosity (himself suffering from the loss of his brother...why? I don't know. Probably buried in draft three of this beast) and sets out to find who's conducting the mind control. With his Goth Chick Love Interest (Katie Holmes), they uncover more than they bargained for, and end up on a desperate chase in and out of capture.

The whole setup actually hints at interesting stuff. The numbing and dumbing down of America's teens is a gigantic problem in this country, and, as in "Behavior," the Baby Boomers are the ones who either want to make them all zombies or put them in jail. This cynical, horrifying idea of a truly "lost generation," a cadre of people who cannot be "fixed," is way more pervasive in modern culture than you might think. Boomers have opined out loud that everyone between the ages of 14 and 30 should just go away 'cuz there's nothing outside heavy-duty operant conditioning that could cure any of them of their Neanderthalism.

This fertile sociological ground, however, is largely wasted in pursuit of the Perfect Soundtrack. Edited to fit the perceived nanosecond attention span of your average teen, "Behavior" is spliced together with unnecessarily loud car starts, door closings and about 30 alternative rock hits. Now I'm the LAST red-blooded American to tell movies to stop using music, but the transparency of the soundtrack department is beginning to be as obvious as a can of Coke and Chips Ahoy sitting, rather obviously, on all the kitchen tables.

What's worse, is they only play about 10 seconds of the song, not hardly enough time for a body like me to RAWK. When not screeching Harvey Danger at threshold-of-pain levels, "Behavior" reverts to mind-blowing banal dialogue, the kind of stuff my little sister, no rocket scientist herself, would scoff at. When are these "teen movie" people going to realize the incredible language and vernacular of today's young folks? Seriously, we kids speak in a fascinating fluency, and though we punctuate it with "like" and "dude" every third word, we are still capable of remarkable finesse and erudition. The kid with baggy pants sitting next to me spoke more loquaciously about his Junior Mints than these bozos on screen did about their entire lives.

In the end, it's the same old crap: two or three pretty boys (all of whom look exactly the same in every movie) tussle with the same bad guys and fall in love with your favorite cast member of "Party of Five" or "Dawson's Creek." Katie Holmes is downright gorgeous, to be sure, but is anyone going to bother to step up to the plate and write something worth seeing? Hollow, vapid, mean-spirited, pretentiously serious and overly stylized, "Disturbing Behavior" is a good-looking machine full of Sound and Fury, and signifying Less than Nothing in a generation that deeply needs someone to understand it.

—Ian Williams

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