Brief Primer:
A high school girl (the eponymous character, played by Eileen Boylan) has the ability to know when people are lying. She spends most of her time trying and failing to be Daria, while also seeing the truth in the form of subtitles anytime a person lies to her. She's dating a guy and wants to date another guy, or something.
Grooooan. Imagine, if you can, an episode of Heroes where a new character is introduced (to those familiar with the show this should be an easy task, as I think I just described every episode of the show - also this isn't the place to bash Heroes, I'd need a whole other blog*, sorry), only this character is even less compelling than anyone already on the show. Her superpower? She knows when people are lying to her, and she knows the truth they're trying to hide. Now, if I hadn't framed this so negatively, it might have seemed like an interesting premise, and it could have been if this movie hadn't sucked so much.
It's a shame, because there is a good movie in this idea, somewhere, but it's not here. The story revolves around the life of a surly southwestern high school girl with a creepy looking boyfriend who is tempted (her, not him) by a back-in-town-after-being-gone-for-awhile-guy. The three mostly just sit around waiting for it to be time for one to drive another home when they get done being at any given boring location. It's as though the movie tried to compensate for its fantastic element by grounding its other characters so hard in reality that it bores its audience to tears. I'll credit it for capturing what high school is really like for a lot of suburban people (high school life is mostly being bored and sad and waiting around for something to happen while occasionally making a mistake), but I don't need to watch that - I went to high school (and before you argue that by that logic I'd only want to watch movies that don't take place in reality, spare me, I just don't want to watch movies that don't do anything engaging with their reality). The movie almost gets interesting when Dakota finds out this out-of-towner appears never to lie (or can she simply not detect it, hmm?), but instead of becoming some kind of actual conflict the pair's relationship just slogs on like anyone else in the universe's might. Sometimes understated, minimalism works (like when this guy makes a movie), but it doesn't work here in Dakota Skye's half-baked magical-realism universe. Fortunately it's on Netflix Instant, so you don't even have to avoid asking for a DVD.
3 out of 10
*Here is how much Heroes Sucks: a Blog - coming December 2009
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