Behaving Badly is a movie I hadn’t heard about, despite the fact that I absolutely love Selena Gomez (I think she’s just so damn adorable!). It’s a movie about a teenage boy who, after having made some bad choices, has led to his mother’s attempted suicide, his sister, best friend, the girl he’s crushing on, and practically half the town (not literally but it kind of seems like it) getting thrown in jail.
This teenaged youth is Rick Stevens, played by Natt Wolff, a new actor whom I haven’t actually heard of before but is quite funny in his own right (I can actually see why they let this guy headline his own movie!). He does some freelance work for his sister’s (a stripper who wants to go to Stanford) boss, which generally involves getting strippers to work when they don’t show up. On this particular day, she doesn’t want to and promises him a blow job if he’ll say he didn’t see her. Now, he’s a virgin who constantly thinks about sex (like most men his age… like most men any age) so it barely lasts a fraction of a second (with a cute quip that would damage any man’s ego in a hot second). Upon telling his best friend, whose mother overhears, said mother promptly decides she has to bed her best friend’s son (you read that right, he’s best friends with his mother’s best friend’s son – just in case it wasn’t all that clear!).
Comedy ensues.
Apparently it’s widely known that the son of a infamous mobster kingpin goes to their school, and this particular kid, Karlis Malinauskas (Nate Hartley plays one creepy character) overhears Rick telling his best friend Billy Bender (Lachlan Buchanan) that he has a huge crush on Nina Pennington (Selena Gomez). Naturally this leads to an impromptu bet, the real bad choice that leads all of the characters to their unfortunate doom (Note to self, don’t ever make a bet with mobster’s kid, for some reason I just doubt it would work out in my favor).
All of this is on top of Billy’s mother, Pamela Bender (Elisabeth Shue) demanding sex left and right, completely ignoring her best friend Lucy Stevens (Mary Louise-Parker who pulls double duty in this flick as Saint Lola, Rick’s guardian… yeah I doubt I’d want her as a guardian angel but you win some you lose some). Throw in his crazy family, stripper sister Kristen Stevens (played by ASHLEY RICKARDS from Awkward. No less!), Steven Stevens (god some people shouldn’t have kids, played by Mitch Hewer), and his sex addicted inattentive father Joseph Stevens (played by Cary Elwes) Rick is almost entirely on his own at home.
I have to say, when I started this movie I didn’t really have high hopes for it. I had never heard of it, I only knew about four of the actors, and the humor was raunchy (which can cannot be a good thing depending on one’s mood, the people watching the movie with you, how good the jokes are, how good the overall movie is without them, and so on and so on). As I watched the movie, though, despite its nonsensicalness at times, I found myself laughing harder the longer the movie was on. A few surprise cameos showed up, bringing the movie up in my opinion, I do love it when people I know show up in the most unexpected of places! For one, I was really surprised when Heather Graham showed up practically out of nowhere, but hey sometimes you need to just have fun with your job. That Dylan McDermott played the owner of a strip club with a porn stache, tiger print underwear, and a bad tan almost brought me to tears with laughter.
Sometimes a movie is better than first appearances and this movie definitely pulled me in rather quickly (five minutes was all it took!).
Lloydd Marshall Books 