Do Revenge Does Strangers on a Train (Plus Every Other Major High School Movie)

Operating under the assumption that the high school experience is anything like it was in the 90s and 00s, Do Revenge seeks to pay homage to the films that, like, invented it. This, of course, includes the latterly referred to Mean Girls, one of many teen movies of The Canon that gets loosely alluded to throughout Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s fourth script (this one co-written with Celeste Ballard) and counting. But, more obviously, the film is intended to be a “high school movie edition” of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which some might actually recognize better as 1987’s Throw Momma From the Train.

Similarly to Throw Momma From the Train making unbridled mention of being a rip-off of Strangers on a Train within the narrative, Do Revenge prefers to achieve the same “subtle” nods with Cruel Intentions instead. That’s, of course, why Sarah Michelle Gellar appears as the Headmaster of Rosehill Country Day, an elite private school in Palm Beach (making it among the few high school movies to fuck with Miami). In other words, Kathryn Merteuil would be so disappointed that this is the route her adult self chose to take.

As someone who wasn’t “born into” this world of privilege and pretension, Drea Torres (Camila Mendes) embodies more recent outsider character tropes in high school contexts, in the spirit of Vanessa (Jessica Szohr) and Jenny (Taylor Momsen) in Gossip Girl. Granted, the poor girl who has to thrift shop for her clothes and make it work to fit in was truly crystallized by Molly Ringwald as Andie Walsh in 1986’s Pretty in Pink. Drea is nothing like Andie, however, far more confident and able to ingratiate herself easily into the popular crowd, consisting of Tara Scott (Alisha Boe, no stranger to the high school “opus” via 13 Reasons Why), Meghan Perez (Paris Berelc) and Montana Ruiz (Maia Reficco). One will, of course, note that things have at least become a little less white since the heyday of the teen movie. Except in the case of Max Broussard (Austin Abrams, playing a role that’s in total opposition to Ethan Lewis on Euphoria). As one of the few vanilla faces of the crew, that’s probably why Max banks on promoting himself as a “feminist.”

This could be part of why Drea makes the mistake of letting her guard down with him, despite knowing that she always has to work twice as hard to stay in the world that her friends and boyfriend take for granted. Perhaps she got too comfortable after making it on Teen Vogue’s next generation list, or when Tara threw her an elaborate birthday bash, which is where the film opens (specifically, with a close-up on a Florida license plate that reads: DUMBTCH).

Slowly easing us into voiceover mode, Drea tells her audience (after a fellow bitch at the party starts blabbing to everyone Drea got her dress at the Salvation Army), “And before you judge me before caring about status, everyone cares about status.” Her declaration is one of many telltale giveaways that 1) this is written by a millennial presuming to understand Gen Z, supposedly filled with nothing but Greta Thunberg and X González types and 2) that Gen Z is possibly the most hypocritical generation of all in that it feigns wanting to shirk the materialism and vapidity of their millennial forebears while also constantly grafting every element from them.

This includes, needless to say, the teen movie genre. And the most major way Do Revenge “pays homage” to teen comedies of the past is casting a twenty-eight-year-old as a high school student. But one thing of the era Do Revenge covets that hasn’t changed is getting someone straight to play gay, something Maya Hawke already has a reputation for thanks to the character of Robin Buckley on Stranger Things.

This time, she’s Eleanor Levatan, to whom we’re first introduced at the tennis camp (where we are meant to comprehend that both “teen” girls will get their own voiceover perspective) Drea has been exiled to as mere “worker” among her peers. This after having been brutally backstabbed by Max in the wake of him “casually” asking her to send him a “little video” to “keep him company” over the summer while they’re apart. For reasons that remain to be seen, Max opts to leak that video to the entire school (which is far more believable than the idea that Drea would send it to him as a Snapchat).

In what is everyone’s worst nightmare, Drea shows up the next day to Rosehill to find that all the students seem to be staring at her, “and not in a good way.” It doesn’t take long for Tara to pull up the video on her phone and see the cause of these pearl-clutching reactions. This being indicative of yet another way in which Gen Z hasn’t really evolved to be “above” slut-shaming, for technology has opened a whole new bag of tricks for the practice.

Livid over Max’s betrayal, she approaches him to find that he’s pretending as though he’s on the horn with his lawyer about his phone being hacked. Drea isn’t stupid enough to fall for the lie, punching him in the face in front of everybody. In this moment, Bianca Stratford (Larisa Oleynik) in 10 Things I Hate About You comes to mind when she punches the equally as douchey Joey Donner (Andrew Keegan) at the prom for committing a less technologically-oriented form of betrayal. 10 Things I Hate About You will appear a few more times in varying forms, like Drea getting in a paint war with her new romantic interest, Russ (Rish Shah), the way Katarina (Julia Stiles) and Patrick (Heath Ledger) get into a paintball war. And yes, Rosehill looks exactly like the type of bougie, college campus-esque school that Padua High was going for.

Too “refined,” indeed, to condone a violent act against its “golden boy.” Hence, after being reprimanded and put on probation by the Headmaster, Drea decides, “Peaking in high school is cringe anyway.” This said as the opening notes to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal” commence and the movie really gets started. The song is the first to provide a key soundtrack example of blending Gen Z-centric music with the songs of the era that Do Revenge seeks to emulate. To that end, music supervisor Rob Lowry was also certain to include the only other musical “teen queen” (now twenty) of the Gen Z moment, Billie Eilish—selecting none other than “Happier Than Ever.” But, naturally, Lowry can’t resist throwing in the ultimate from a teen movie soundtrack, “The Impression That I Get” by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones (later, a cover of “Kids in America” will also play). Because Clueless is yet another movie from The Canon that gets frequently referenced, not just in the schoolgirl uniforms that are actually required (even if that’s more of a carry-over from Cruel Intentions… and Gossip Girl), but in the way that Max’s sister, Gabbi (Talia Ryder), introduces Eleanor to each clique of the school (she’s also wielded to flash a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which we all know was the source material for Cruel Intentions). The hokeyness of such a tour is addressed by Eleanor in the line, “I mean, as a disciple of the 90s teen movie, I’d be offended if I didn’t get one.”

And get one she does, as Gabbi describes, “Over here, we have our Instagram witches. Allegra, their leader, apparently made a girl levitate at a sleepover playing Light As A Feather [here, a The Craft reference]. Now she’s queen of the zodiac thots… and she’s a Scorpio.” All Eleanor can think to reply is, “Hot.” Gabbi continues, “The horny theater kids. Last year, they tried to mount a mostly white production of Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda sent a cease and desist.” Eleanor titters as Gabbi goes on, “Coming up we have our farm kids. They run the school farm led by Carissa. When her request to make Rosehill go vegan was denied, she left her DivaCup in the middle of the cafeteria in protest. It was full.” Before Eleanor can react to that, she’s stopped in her tracks by what amounts to Do Revenge’s version of The Plastics, asking, “Who are they?” Gabbi replies, “Ah, Rosehill’s royal court. The cream of the incredibly entitled crop. Be careful with them. They’re all as calculated as they are beautiful.” It sounds very akin to Damian (Daniel Franzese) from Mean Girls saying Gretchen’s (Lacey Chabert) hair is so big “because it’s full of secrets.”

In any case, this little introduction is so much briefer than what we got from Clueless, from which both 10 Things I Hate About You and Mean Girls pulled in terms of grafting from the playbook of clique introductions to the proverbial new kid. Elsewhere, the bright sartorial color palettes (as can only be done by L.A. or Miami “kids”) and manifold jewelry and hair accessories of the movie’s costume design are also most reminiscent of Clueless (complete with the fluffy “Cher pen” Drea uses at her desk, as though this school wouldn’t have iPads or laptops instead). Not to mention Eleanor playing the Tai role with regard to getting made over (Courtney Love fittingly sings over this scene, “Oh make me over/I’m all I wanna be” for an ironic, self-aware touch about how makeover scenes are antiquated in this Gen Z epoch). But because it’s the present-day, Eleanor is sure to tell Drea that getting a makeover is “problematic,” to which Drea ultimately responds, “Sometimes, you have to pretend to be someone else to get what you want.” Merely a philosophy that’s part of Teen Movies 101. And life in general.

But Mean Girls doesn’t fade away so quickly as a reference point as well. Least of all when Drea pulls a Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) with Tara, who serves as the Regina George (Rachel McAdams) of the equation when she ends up taking Max as her own boyfriend, making him the Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett) of the outfit. Except in Drea’s case, she has nothing but contempt for Max and is actually more upset that the girl she thought was her best friend could be so fair-weather. When she processes that Tara is with Max, the former says, “Oh, you didn’t know?” with a tinge of fake-pity that mirrors Taylor Vaughn’s (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) line in She’s All That when she asks Laney Boggs (Rachael Leigh Cook), “You didn’t think you became popular for real, did you?”

But Eleanor actually does become popular “for real,” thanks to plenty of tips and less than gentle nudging from Drea, who needs her to get on the inside in order to acquire the necessary dirt to take Max down. It only requires one invite to a party at his house to find out that Max is cheating on Tara with Allegra, the aforementioned leader of the Instagram witch clique.

And, talking of cliques that are destroyed by exposed secrets, Mean Girls shines through again during the mushroom-drugging scene, at which time a student calls her mom and says, “Mom, please just come get me! I don’t wanna be here!” the same way another student makes a similar plea after Regina posts copies of the Burn Book throughout North Shore High. And yes, there’s a moment when Drea looks just as smug and self-satisfied as Regina upon causing mayhem with the released pages of that book when she and Eleanor instead release multiple texts going back years that indicate what a philanderer Max has been with just about every popular girl in school.

Alas, unlike 90s and 00s teen movies, it isn’t as easy to take down the popular kids anymore—mainly because it’s more challenging to scandalize people now. Ergo, Do Revenge’s errant signs of pandering to what it “means” to be of Gen Z. Which is how Max evades total condemnation after the texts are released (Gossip Girl blast-style). Because he “spins” the truth, in conjunction with Tara (who doesn’t want to be humiliated), to say that they’re “ethically non-monogamous.” Something that never would have been a scapegoat excuse in the millennial days of high school. Nor would one have witnessed a group of kids screaming, “Climate change is not a lie! Please don’t let our planet die!” But that imploration is accurately negated by Gabbi telling Eleanor all those “planet-loving” students use plastic straws. A telling contradiction in the generation that “hearts” Shein. And then there’s Max doing everything a rich white boy can to remain relevant in the current landscape by founding a club called the CIS Hetero Men Championing Female Identifying Students League, shouting, “I wanna be an ally!” Naturally, beneath his carefully curated veneer, he’s a raging misogynist that Drea remains determined to take down.

A moment we see come to fruition as she broods about his hypocrisy in the bathroom at the beginning of the new school year, when Eleanor walks in to “unwittingly” give Drea the idea that they should “team up and do each other’s revenge” (yes, it’s grammatically incorrect in the spirit of “do sex”). Watching the movie through a retroactive lens, the presence of mirrors throughout this bathroom scene feels like a pointed nod to Hitchcock, who was always fond of wielding mirrors as a symbolic device in films about duplicity, including Strangers on a Train. A befuddled Eleanor listens as Drea lays out the plot of said movie by informing her new “bestie,” “They deserve to go down for what they did to us, but we can’t go after them ourselves.” Plus, it was Eleanor who claimed to wish for “a high school hitman… or woman or NB.” That’s “non-binary,” in case you’re not attuned to Gen Z parlance. Which Robinson seems sure to “lightly mock” when the opportunity arises. For example, through the mouthpiece of someone like Gabbi saying, “If you get offended, Rosehill does have a designated safe space for that.”

Where Do Revenge biffs its commitment to “homage” (so often a polite word for copycatting) is in just how blatant the imitation of previous films from The Canon can become. Like laying it on thick with the Cruel Intentions parallel by having Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” play as the video of Max admitting to leaking the Snap of Drea happens at the requisite “final party of senior year.”

Talking of that two-word phrase, in contrast to another recent Netflix movie, Senior Year, which shows millennials crossing over to Gen Z’s woke dark side, it feels as though Do Revenge wants to make it abundantly clear that Gen Z still has little of their own to lay claim to when it comes to iconic and landmark pop culture, particularly with regard to the high school movie genre.