2.5 stars out of 5
It comes up lame. There, I got it out of the way right off the bat. Whew.
I like thrillers, I like mean girls, the trailer was fun, the cystic-fibrosis girl from Bates Motel is in this, and Unsane and Isle of Dogs weren’t out yet, so on cheap Tuesday I headed out to see Thoroughbreds.
The set-up: You’ve got upper-class teenage Amanda (Olivia Cooke), who used to be a prize-winning jockey, but, something nasty happened. On Bates Motel, Cooke was a goodie-goodie, but here she’s a baddie-baddie. The thrill of this wears off pretty quickly. The nice upper-class girl in the story is Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy), who adds no joy to this Mudville of a movie. It turns out Lily is being paid handsomely to hang out with/tutor her old messed-up school pal Amanda. But guess what? Lily is kind of screwy too! Some blame goes to her evil stepdad Mark (Paul Sparks, who had that great laugh as Mickey Doyle on Boardwalk Empire, but is a bore here). Amanda and Lily eventually recruit townie bad-boy Tim (Anton Yelchin, wishing he’d been backed over by his Jeep Grand Cherokee before agreeing to do this film) to do some vengeance stuff.
With some high camp mixed in, this could’ve been pretty entertaining. Alas, it is not. Tension, I’m supposed to feel building tension, but none is present. The stepdad should be a real unlikeable villain but, eh, he’s not. How about some sexual fireworks? Nope, not between anyone. Yelchin is the strongest actor in Thoroughbreds (he gets to deliver the best line, calling one of the girls “Swimfan“), but Cooke and Sparks don’t transcend their TV résumés.
One half point awarded for noted cellist Erik Friedlander’s minimal, Birdman-reminiscent score.
Maybe stepdad Mark wakes up to find a horse head in bed next to him. That’s how you make a movie!
Jack Silbert, curator