‘Peaking in high school is cringe anyway…’
While you could point to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Revenge of the Nerds and Porkys as precursors, the ’90s was surely the high water mark for teen comedies. Clueless, American Pie, She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, Dazed and Confused and on and on. Heck, even the horror movies were basically teen comedies in the ’90s (Scream, Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer). And so, it feels right that in this, the year of our Lord 2023, someone should make a teen comedy totally indebted to those ’90s classics…
Drea (Camila Mendes) is a fallen queen bee out for revenge against her former charges. Eleanor (Maya Hawke) has also been wronged but by a different set of dipshits. Together, the two of them cook up a Strangers on a Train-style scenario in which both of them attempt to take down the other’s bully.
Do Revenge isn’t just lit and shot like a ’90s teen comedy, it also boasts a direct throughline with the ingenious casting of Sarah Michelle Gellar as the school principal. It also features a soundtrack featuring The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Hole and Third Eye Blind – seminal ’90s classics all. Mendes and Hawke make for a compelling double act and elsewhere Austin Abrams is suitably sleazy as the most popular boy in school while Talia Ryder provides an assured performance as Eleanor’s potential love interest Gabbi.
Whilst the plot possibly takes a few too many twists and turns in the third act, the characters are so likeable and the writing so sharp that I was still fully invested going into the film’s neat conclusion. Writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (with a co-writing credit for Celeste Ballard) keeps things light in a film that is consistently entertaining throughout its two-hour runtime.
Do Revenge is the definition of light entertainment, it’s not just a nostalgia fest. Instead, this is one of those films that pretty much everyone will enjoy as long as you give yourself to Drea and Eleanor’s friendship as I did.