What parent would take their child to see this movie? This, folks, is the reason the NC-17 rating exists. And yet Hard Candy is rated R -- as were High Tension and both Saw movies before it. Evidently Lionsgate, the company behind all four, knows something the rest of us don't about how the MPAA operates.
No doubt, just like the castration-happy "heroine" of this twisted psycho-thriller, they made a few small trims to earn an R rating, but as best as I can recall, the movie is no different from the version that shocked Sundance just over a year ago.

Hard Candy is the most extreme English-language studio release I've seen in years. According to San Francisco-based blogger Michael Guillen, actress Ellen Page scoffed at the rating. "I really would like teenage girls and boys to see this and to see a character like this," she said. "Hopefully, they'll just sneak in or something."

I couldn't more strongly disagree.

Hard Candy is an exploitation film, pure and simple. It's slicker than its sadistic B-movie counterparts, but that's becoming increasingly common these days. The movie purports to be an edgy and extreme attack on Internet predators and child pornography. It's not. It feeds on the same voyeurism it indicts.

Remember, the movie calls for Page (only 17 when the movie was made) to convincingly simulate a castration. Like Hitchcock's Psycho, the fact that the audience never sees the knife penetrate flesh doesn't make the experience any less explicit.

Hard Candy is difficult going, relentlessly brutal even for the audience, but I won't condemn it.

The acting is incredible. I don't buy either character's behavior for a minute, and yet the way Page and Angels in America's Patrick Wilson interact suggests complete mastery of their craft -- especially in light of the hermetically sealed hypothetical scenario playwright Brian Nelson's concocts for them.

Director David Slade's antiseptic style certainly complements the material. By eliminating medium shots altogether, he creates the most unsettling, first-person experience possible (the film is told entirely in over-intimate close-ups and standoffish long shots). The identification is so complete that many viewers will find the castration scene unwatchable.

It's also a fascinating experiment in digital color timing, a process by which Slade can tweak the visual temperature of a scene by dialing between warm, sensual pinks and cool, homicidal blues in post-production, toying with his audience even further.

Ultimately, Hard Candy doesn't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion on pedophilia. However, it excels on another level, as one of the most frightening treatments of an equally compelling psychological phenomenon: specifically, the righteousness of youth.

This 14-year-old girl believes in her cause so strongly that she can justify behavior any rational adult would deem unthinkable. Her actions reveal the kind of reasoning that drives some young people to designate themselves judge, jury and executioner over the perceived sins of others. Consider the Columbine killers, the kids who tortured Matthew Shepard, even the Hitler Youth.

I see the same hubris in the teenage actress who advises kids to sneak in to see a movie like Hard Candy. And it scares me to no end.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]