That Hard Candy was going to pass out underneath the weight of stupidity shovelled into its creation would have been apparent immediately had the Bishop watched the special features included on the DVD before taking in the actual film. This is a work about that most impossible of subjects—paedophilia—for which its empty-headed writer, Brian Nelson, has taken for his inspiration Sarah Michelle Geller’s Buffy, perhaps TV’s most sexualised young-girl protagonist of the last ten years; known, in her first season, for fighting in dresses so short one could high-jump over them. Here is not a scribe to be taken seriously, and neither is this silly revenge-fantasy-by-proxy.
Indeed there is a worrying sense that the hapless audience member is expected to be wooed by the boyish, mop-haired suggestiveness of Ellen Page’s Hayley, though she is fortunately such an unengaging young actress that this is unlikely to take place. Nineteen at the time the film was made, she plays her fourteen-year-old fury as though those ages were reversed, muttering over-importantly with the asthmatic delivery of one of those horrid adolescent prodigies who show up on current affairs shows on slow news weeks. (In other words, we might safely conclude that this is no Jodie Foster.) Patrick Wilson, as the paedophile, is held in check and out of rhythm by his co-star’s unsteadiness. He may or may not have some ability, but in this piece he, like Page, does his best work typing out his lines in the picture’s chat-room prologue.
Even as a self-absorbed thriller Hard Candy fails, not least because the notion of an adolescent girl threatening a rather nasty piece of work with castration might need be addressed with something other the gusto with which a teenage boy sits down to play Grand Theft Auto. The narrative ceases moving forward from the moment Wilson's predator wakes up tied to a chair, replaced by an extended torture sequence which we might all like to inflict on this sort of person but which gains nothing from being filmed. The Bishop gathers there is some attempt to fill out the drama with the possibility that the accused may be innocent, but when a barely pubescent teenager is taking a scalpel to the testicles of a suspected murderer and pederast, surely there are more important things to do than bait the audience with the question of whether or not he did it.
There is probably a worthwhile story, here, but it needs a goodly deal more thought than this comic-book production team is capable of applying. The Bishop also has something of a concern that no-one involved, apart from Page, appears to be a woman, and given her relative youth and the strength of her work here it is questionable whether she is, either. Death and the Maiden is no masterpiece, but it has certainly dealt with Hard Candy’s victim-victimiser role reversal with considerably more maturity, not to mention plot, and when it comes to the difficult subject of underage obsession, your Anglican articulator humbly suggests that the dull minds at work here leave Valdimir Nabokov in no danger of being emasculated. Hard Candy is balls.
