Cynical Cinema

You know how Maury Povich, every now and then, brings a bunch of “out-of-control teens” on his show, and they freak out on stage, and their mothers cry?  And the kids say “yeah, I’m fifteen, and I smoke weeeeeeed, and I drink tequiiiiiiiila, and I have seeeeeex with men!”  And the mothers cry.  And the kid comes out and she gives the finger to the audience, and the audience boos the girl because they see what her mother is going through, and I sit at home thinking “ummm…it’s just weed and booze and sex.  What’s the big deal?”  I guess it’s the fact that they’re so proud of it.  The really bad ones are prostituting themselves, or sleeping with much older guys, or they have moved on to crystal meth.  And Maury Povich acts all righteously indignant, and says “can’t you see what this is doing to your poor mother?”  and the kid doesn’t care, and yells “y’all don’t know me!” and then drops the “I’m pregnant” bombshell, and six months later she’s back on Maury with eleven different guys and they test the DNA…God I love that Maury Povich show!

Anyway, at the end of the My Teenager is Out Of Control Show, they always send them to Boot Camp.  And we see some drill sargeant yelling at these girls from one inch away, and then we see the girls do some pushups, and then they cry, and everything is better and they hug their moms and say sorry, and the show ends.  Well, these boot camps actually exist.  And Boot Camp is a documentary about what really goes on in one…OK.  I made that up.  Boot Camp is actually a live-action movie about Life After Povich.  Where a bunch of out-of-control teens are rounded up and sent to an island in the South Pacific to turn their lives around.  But wait - it turns out that Boot Camp isn’t so fun after all!  And it’s also nothing like on the Maury show, because SOME of them are actually boys as well!

So it’s a boot camp, where Peter Stormare and his cadre of creepy militia-types torture and rape these kids until they are completely broken, then…what?  Ship them back to their families, broken and destroyed?  But at least they won’t act up and cause problems and make their parents do work any more…Mila Kunis is the star of this movie (you know, Jackie from That 70s Show), and this is not her star turn.  (That may have come with the new film Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)  She gets sent to this boot camp by her Wicked Step Father who exerts Mind Control over her Real Mother.  Once she is there, she is basically a prisoner-of-war in Nazi Germany, with horrible abuse and crazed group thinking and a cultish mentality to Stormare’s followers.

Her boyfriend, fearing for her safety, arranges to be sent to the same island for some re-programming of his own.  I guess  his idea is to break her out.  And it’s a testament to the cartoonish idiocy of this movie that he actually manages to do so.  The dialogue is incredibly lame, the premise gets old after six minutes, and the acting is bonkers at best.  The conclusion is so trite and lame it belongs in some ridiculous Lord of the Flies type after-school special.  At least you get to see Mila Kunis boobs.  I imagine that will put Boot Camp on Mr. Skin’s must-see DVDs of the year, but simply seeing naked flesh from a former star of That 70s Show is a piss-poor reason to watch a movie this lousy.  Skip Boot Camp altogether.