Director: Peter Hutchings
Rating: 3.5/5
The Outskirts is a fun and entertaining movie, with a typical story of US High School drama that teenagers go through before they go to college.
We’ve seen many movies with this theme, and this one is very similar to other movies on the same topic. There is an evil wannabe Prom Queen who is typically blond and pretty (Claudia Lee as Whitney Bennett). But, in this film the evil queen is also fake and gets exposed for it. Thus, she is not rich like queens in other films but lies that she is rich and that her family is successful. In reality, she is the daughter of a maintenance family that looks after big mansion where she falsely claims to live. While there is nothing wrong with being a daughter of a family that honestly lives and earns its wages, this is not how Whitney defined popular and successful, and her own lies eventually get back to her.
Girls who confront her and take her off her throne are nerds, as in the current cinematography nerdy seem to be the new sexy. Just remember The Big Bang Theory (see here), also referenced in this film. Thus, Jodi (Victoria Justice) and Mindy (Eden Sher) make a pact to get back to Whitney and take her down from her self-absorbed throne.
By doing so, Mindy who desperately wants to go MIT, becomes as evil as the wannabe queen was and it takes falling out with her best friend Jodi to realise she is no better than Whitney to let it all go. As such, this film does have a message regardless of its entertaining character and a light story, i.e. it is possible to take wannabe queen down and get rid of bullying but it is also possible to realise we can be better than that, and after achieving revenge just let it go. As Mindy’s professor (Daniel Eric Gold) states at the end of the movie, it is not worth it because there will always be bad people around and we cannot fight all of them. Indeed, we can just deal with it and learn to move on and look towards the future.
While this is a light story, bullying in schools does happen and what this film shows is that the bullied can stand up to bullying but only if they stick together and jointly engage in redefining popular. Indeed, nerdy is the new sexy and new popular.
Thank you for reading.