“Do Revenge,” directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, is a playful, sharp-fanged satire that feels just like the ’90s teen comedy hammered into trendy emojis: crown, knife, fireplace, winky face. Drea Torres (Camila Mendes) is the Machiavellian queen of her pastel plaid-clad prep faculty. However the day after the bold scholarship pupil is coronated as one in every of Teen Vogue’s superb teenagers — an extravagant bash that slaps her face on balloons, cupcakes and topiaries — Drea is dethroned when her nude video is posted on-line.
Drea’s ex-boyfriend Max (Austin Abrams) claims innocence and preserves his reputation by founding an allyship group referred to as the Cis Hetero Males Championing Feminine Figuring out College students League. She isn’t shopping for his act. But, on this performative trendy period, as penned by Robinson and Celeste Ballard, Drea’s reputable rage can’t be legitimately unleashed with out danger of expulsion, scholastic and social.
To show Max’s hypocrisy, Drea enlists a timid outcast named Eleanor (Maya Hawke) to swap their revenge targets in a personality assassination plot that riffs from imply woman icon Patricia Highsmith’s novel “Strangers on a Practice.” (Highsmith goes uncited; the women choose the wrathful enthusiasm of Glenn Shut in “Deadly Attraction,” right here referred to as “Glennergy.”)
The script has an ear for youth converse, a diction of hyper-compliments (Eleanor refers to Drea as her “revenge mommy”) and dizzying, dissembling accusations of bullying. Whereas the stress collapses within the disappointingly tame final act — the movie would moderately forged the “Merciless Intentions” star Sarah Michelle Gellar as its faculty principal than be so merciless itself — Robinson convinces the viewers to share her giddy delight at pairing final technology’s highschool flick aesthetics with this technology’s moral anguish, significantly within the soundtrack’s needle-drops the place Courtney Love and Le Tigre mosh alongside Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish.
Do Revenge
Not rated. Operating time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix.