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Wild Child is like getting your genitals ripped off in an industrial accident. This film defies all logic and reasons as to how it was funded and released by a major studio. This film blatantly lacks cohesion, character development, believable dialogue, and any modicum of a logical story. Wild Child is literally a compilation of incomprehensible scenes sloppily stitched together.
- Summary –
Director: Nick Moore
Cast: Emma Roberts, Nick Pettyfer, Natasha Richardson, Aidan Quinn, Juno Temple, Georgia King, Kimberley Nixon, Johnny Pacar, Shirley Henderson, Lexi Ainsworth, Nick Frost.
Year of Release: 2008
Duration: 90 Minutes
Plot: A Malibu teen girl gets shipped off to a boarding school in England after having a hard time controlling her wildly rebellious behavior which led to a lot of frustration for her father.
Wild Child is a diabolical attempt at depicting a road trip that tells the story of a girl moving from being a socially challenged uptight person to a warm-hearted friend. In all respects, Wild Child is not even close to being remotely ‘wild’. It manages to avoid anything that comes out as unique throughout its entire time span. The movie contains a truly shocking level of nonsensical dialogue combined with weak character development and broken plots which makes the movie as exciting as undergoing a surgical procedure for an ingrown toenail.
Unfortunately, how much I wanted to love Wild Child, I have recently grown to harbor a lot of disdain or loathing towards this film. The worst rendition of a modern-day Clueless or any other teenage comedy relies heavily on Wild Child. It feels as if the filmmakers threw together hair-brained notions of self-centered girls in desperate need of attention. All of this is to create a piece of art that wholly fits the poster of Wild Child. The plot is literally straightforward enough to be drawn in the back of a stamp. It also possesses characters so empty, devoid of any identity, or personality that would make them real human beings, and watching mannequins spring into life would be a more exhilarating experience. I think I might be in the wrong movie.
In Malibu, Hollywood, Poppy Moore is a spoiled daughter who loves partying and shopping, but her life spirals out of control after she gets into a fistfight with a girl, forcing her to stay with her father in a posh English boarding school for girls. Since Poppy does not have the luxuries that she is used to such as emails and mobile phones, she tries to get herself expelled by getting into a relationship with the headmaster’s handsome young son. This leads her into conflict with the head mistress’ daughter, who is the head girl of the school and a very nasty piece of work. With the help of her “friends” in her dorm room, Poppy learns what it means to be a true friend, a young woman, and most importantly, herself.
Having the equivalent of a painful industrial accident while watching Wild Child is an understatement. A movie with no structured narrative or traces of cohesion is beyond belief to be published by a major studio, who did so publicly with great fanfare. It is impossible to justify how the characters are written. There’s no progression of the characters, no logic to the plot, and with such poorly written dialogue, Wild Child abruptly passes from scene to scene.
Skip that Dead Poets Society nonsense!
The movie begins with Poppy Moore (Emma Roberts) vandalizing her father’s girlfriend’s property – a woman we never even meet – before going through her father’s rage when he discovers that his home is a pigsty. We are not even five minutes into the movie before things start moving and even without Poppy and her father having any semblance to their relationship, we are estranged from them. All we get is what we are told and what we deduce from the insipid script. Why is Poppy such a twat? We don’t quite know (or care) till much is cleared by a more heartfelt scene towards the last of the movie but at that point, it’s too late. She is saddled with the stereotype of an obnoxious American, despised by her UK schoolmates and hated by the people she tries to befriend. And it’s not Roberts’ fault, it’s the awful scripting and the weak character arc.
All that pink was too much for him.
Schooled in Scandal’s Poppy takes an immediate dislike to “an upstart school prefect” who is also her poppy’s major rival for the affections of the headmaster’s son is Harriet Bentley. Scowling and pouting her way through the film, Harriet reminds me of a very sad parody of an actual human being. Harriet is without doubt the most cliched, ridiculously and badly acted character ever created for a feature film and Georgine King’s portrayal of her is by far the most hamfisted in a long time. Poor Natasha Richardson, evolving from being married to Liam Neeson, as the school’s headmistress, is rather dull and matriarchal with her stern dialogue as imaginable as Tupperware being original, which is mundane. Alex Pettyfer, as the resident spunk in the film known as Freddie, plays the role of the girls’ lust, and despite his superficial and nonsensical role, he somehow authority it. The most incredible performance probably comes from Aiden Quinn for the father’s part despite being on the screen for around five minutes.
They are completely dull.
The main issue with Wild Child, there are many, is that the story has no development. This movie faces the challenge of having a “copy and paste” attitude towards other movies, incorporating actual story changes and ideas (and characters too) from other successful films. It seems like the film completely skipped out on Poppy’s emotionally engaging part of her back story, which now lets us sympathize with her, even a little bit. The people have no drive and their actions do not actively engage the audience, allowing the plot, no matter how flimsy, to progress with minimal participation from us. The characters are lifeless, full of overused phrases and themes, following a Not Other Teen Movie marker that represents a lack of real imagination in creativity. The poorly offered “bad girl turns good” plot is supposed to impart a lesson to teenage girls, the bottom-line audience of the movie. Even so, it is still in a very relaxed state which leads to the shapeless story with no essence surrounding a multitude of unoriginal scenes. It’s like they used some sort of fill-in-the-blank Word document for scriptwriting and called it a day.
He is cute in an approachable way, seems courteous, interested, and caring. And we have a chemistry that resembles that of vomit aged twenty years.
I confess that I am not the intended demographic for this movie and even that does not matter. A movie such as this one, which so blatantly attempts to appeal to the barely teenager audience, ought to be at least half-decent as a form of entertainment. However, that is not the case. For all of the young girls who think that they’ll be somehow disillusioned by this movie and believe it to be the best movie in the whole universe, there isn’t much I can say that will alter that opinion. However, for those who wish to stimulate their mind beyond a fashion-esque soap opera, you’re better off avoiding this movie altogether. Wild Child is as boring and one-dimensional as a badly made television movie filled with tough stereotypes, mindless violence, and appallingly poor acting.
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