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High school vamp Mini (Nikki Reed, an actress whose name and talent too closely resemble Tara Reid) despises her alcoholic failed actress mother (Carrie-Ann Moss). Because rebelling against a dependency suffering tramp takes some effort, Mini devotes her time to coming up with outrageous new experiences to try. She calls them “first times” which gives us the not-in-the-least-bit-subtle title. Mini nude jumps out of a cake at her own birthday party and from there moves on to high class prostitution. On her first night she’s set up with her father-in-law (Alec Baldwin). He’s so taken by her that he’s easily convinced to help drive mom insane with drugs and pranks so they can be together in their endearing, borderline incestuous lust. Murder, a doggedly dedicated detective and predictable plot twists follow.

I’ll start with the good. Jeff Goldblum has one really great scene. It’s sleazy; it’s funny; it’s what this movie should have been. Come on people, a movie about a teenager sleeping with her step-dad and trying to institutionalize her mother is a bit sleazy. The makers just didn’t go anywhere with it. Carrie-Ann Moss was also a guilty pleasure as the insult-spewing alcoholic mother. Alec Baldwin was there. That’s never a bad thing. And it was kind of funny to see Rick Fox as a self-pimping masseuse for half a minute.

This all isn’t to say the acting, or even casting for that matter, was well-done. Remember that doggedly dedicated detective? He’s played by Luke Wilson. The voice, the demeanor, the hair… all wrong. He came off more like a vaguely incessant, easy going tax inspector. Then there’s Nikki Reed. If she was enough of a terrible actress (or a complete genius) to ham this lame script up, my entire opinion of the movie might have been different. As is, her performance has zero fun but also zero subtlety.

Maybe what I didn’t like was that everything about this movie was bland except the somewhat disturbing premise. Other than Goldblum and Moss, the acting was pretty pedestrian. Even the look of the whole production lacked any style. No wild camera angles or light to match its neo-noir tropes; what ended up on screen looked more like an episode of something off of the WB – functionally boring. Saddest of all, there were so many great opportunities for social jabs. Rich, beautiful people wasting their lives away with alcohol and sex then raising a young girl obsessed with the next big thrill sounds pretty rife for such things.

But the plain Jane writing in Mini’s First Time wouldn’t allow such things. There are a handful of better movies out there for each of its genre mash-ups. In fact, the writing was so formula driven that the “twist” (which I’d seen coming for an hour) was thrown in at the end just because someone seemed to think that was what this type of movie is supposed to have – like giving an eight year old beauty pageant contestant Botox. If you’re going to put in the ubiquitous shocker ending (which is now predictably non-shocking) the least you can do is have a dozen or so twists strewn ahead of it. Take a lesson from Wild Things: if you’re going to do something dumb, at least do it in excess!

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originally posted: 06/26/06 23:29:42
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