I have a soft spot for these sort of twist-within-a-twist-within-a-twist films, both at a certain intellectual level and at a visceral "oho, they tricked me!" level. It is fun to be hoodwinked by a magician who knows his audience and knows sleight-of-hand.

Last year I watched two of Mamet's entries into this canon — The Spanish Prisoner and House of Games — and of the former (which I liked more of the two) I wrote:

The only fault I can assign it is that it lacks any sort of emotional resonance, which sounds like a more biting criticism than I mean it to be.

The Spanish Prisoner was a perfectly-constructed puzzle of a film that took a brilliant plot (with every final-act twist feeling earned) and added a dagger-sharp script and little else, accomplishing exactly what it set out to do and little else.

Wild Things, on the other hand, feels like a funhouse mirror of the same general thesis. There is no precision, no brilliant script, no asexual cynicism: it is pure, sweaty, roiling id, it is Matt Dillon writing SEXCRIMES on a chalkboard, it is Neve Campbell making out with Denise Richards ^[1], it is not thinking about anything too hard.

The reveal of the initial con — Matt and Denise were in on it from the start! — is a great little twist, and I think a more succesful version of this film could have stopped there with the hijinks and then proceed to a more conventional answer to "okay, what happens next?". It is the hubris of the successive twists — the penultimate one, of Kevin Bacon secretly being on it too from the start — that I think takes this film out of its trappings and forces you to realize just how harebrained the entire enterprise is.

And this is a shame, because there are successful moments. The film sells the setting — swampy, overhumid Florida — extremely well, and individual performances (in particular Bill Murray in an early "caricature of a caricature"-type role) work well. But the worst thing a film can do is beggar belief, and Wild Things refuses to let you take it seriously.

★★★