Little Bitches sucks. I hate most coming of age stories that focus in on girlhood because I think they all horribly miss the mark. The best of them is Bottoms, with Lady Bird and Booksmart being close second. But most of them constantly center around the girl’s quest to get laid and be a woman and maybe that is the typical teenage girl experience, but it certainly wasn’t mine. And while Little Bitches isn’t about that, it’s barely about anything.
The story focuses on Kelly (Victoria Gardner), Marisa (Kiersey Clemons) and Annie (Jennette McCurdy), three freshmen best friends who agree to open their college acceptance letters when they are seniors at the big senior party. Cut to senior year, only Annie and Marisa are still friends, with Kelly being popular and having abandoned them. We then follow the girls as they learn about growing up, with constant shots of them walking to class but never actually going to one. Or cutting school for hours despite this all happening in one day. All while randomly talking about how much they masturbate, or how many dicks they want to suck, only before then switching topics to talk about college.
I fucking hate this movie.
The main characters in this are just mostly unintersting, with Marisa is the most ANNOYING character in the world. I think she is supposed to read as the obnoxious but lovable theatre kid, but she’s just an asshole. And it’s just so over the top — she has family troubles, but she lives with her cool grandma and they smoke weed together. And it’s just like — why? Why is this movie trying SO hard to convince us she’s cool when she just sucks.
She has no respect for her friends, will randomly scream and cackle for no reason, emotionally abuses the fuck out of Annie, does these annoying bits where she’ll do a goofy voice well past when it stops being funny, and just is so unlikable I do not understand how she isn’t the villain. She even withholds the fact that Kelly misses them because she doesn’t want to lose Annie — which is gross! Gardner as Kelly barely gets more than three lines and McCurdy is the only one who is charismatic and subdued enough to give a believable performance with the schlock script these girls were handed. But even she has to do this awkward bit where she’s pretending to be a “slut” on the phone and the joke goes on for way too long and she’s doing this bit that made me almost forget she was the only character I sort of liked — but then the bit was over and I liked her again.
This director sucks and clearly doesn’t know when to cut a joke because wow, were there a lot of bits that seemed to go on for hours. Very 2016 Ghostbusters if you catch my drift. And it eats up SO MUCH TIME, time that could be spent getting to know characters.
Kelly barely exists as a character, and only Annie is a sweetheart with any redeeming qualities and motivations. I am rewatching this now and I cannot emphasize how much I hate Marisa. I have never seen Kiersey Clemons in anything else but I’ve heard nothing but good things, so I will write this off as a bad script and bad direction. But wow, this character is insufferable.
Not that the side characters are better either. Everything about this movie reads as someone who either is a teenager wishing these are the things they said, or someone long gone from school whose glory days were in high school and is romanticizing the fuck out of it. This movie wants to be this whole statement but it’s just nothing but pretense and sex jokes and one of the most UNLIKABLE main characters of all time. And then these two cops we follow for no reason, with one of them being normal and the other hating teenagers. Why they eat up so much screen time is beyond me, especially when Kelly BARELY exists.
The writing is absolutely atrocious in this. The script thinks it’s so edgy and saying something but it isn’t more than shallow pretense. The guidance counselor may be the only character MORE annoying than Marisa, between her yelling at the teenagers or saying too much about her bizarre personal life or just making really inappropriate comments about them. All of this is played for laughs but people just don’t act this way and it’s unnatural.
May we have never had a friend like Marisa. Or better yet, may we never be the fucking guidance counselor in adulthood.