Look, you don't watch every movie because it's a good movie. "Boys" the title has wandered in from some gay porno flick shopping list -- is for all intents and purposes a bad movie and even nice film critics have been mean to it. But if this is a failure, this is not your average failure. Oh, no. It has moments, and an interesting, borderline cultish, cast. Skeet Ulrich is almost forgotten, but in his fleeting appearances he has a dysfunctional neediness, luminous sex appeal, a scary attraction you see that also in "As Good As It Gets," where he robs and beats up Greg Kinnear. There's something dangerous and expendable about Skeet. We may think of John C. Reilly in PT Anderson's "Magnolia," and see that same homely touching appeal on idle here in his Maryland State Police role. This was probably the only time the mercurial, offbeat Lucas Haas was conventionally cute enough to match up with a pretty -- at times quite beautiful -- girl like Winona. And her dazed, out-of-it quality she's clearly a young lady who makes nothing but wrong choices in men -- contributes to the curiously touching moments the two have in the amusement park when the high school boy briefly but intensely falls for the 25-year-old and proposes marriage and eternal loyalty and they kiss sweetly and the rest of the world disappears. That's the high point. Now, there's nothing more tedious than the boys in the opening segment nattering at each other, threatening to rat on each other, but curious to get in on any trouble that's going to come downbut the way they behave and look in this movie is completely natural and believable. Like most real schoolboys they're likely to bore each other to death before they'll ever enter into some sort of Lord of the Flies adventure. Chris Cooper what is he doing here? He's playing an archetypal father, the one we don't see in "Dead Poets Society," the flipside of his twisted military dad in "American Beauty." James LeGros and Catherine Keener complete the surprising cast. Using a classic college campus St. Johns, Annapolis -- for a fancy prep school works and heightens the posh effect. The movie doesn't altogether work otherwise. It's energy is sluggish; it has no drive.. But you come back to it looking for something that didn't come together, but might have, because some choice ingredients were there. And won't come this way again.. Check out Haas in "Johns", dated the same year, with David Arquette for another good offbeat role, a wilder, quirkier one that also seems to fit him like a soft old glove. He's never had the role he deserves, but what an actor. James Salter, whose story this is based on, is a very fine writer. The music isn't inappropriate; it's just obtrusively loud, the way schoolboys would play it, if they weren't being properly supervised.
Review of Boys
