Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) bonds with Maureen (Eva Amurri) over a cigarette in the high school locker room. Fast forward one year later and now they’re best of friends. But when a Columbine-type psycho decides to kill only one of them – and it’s Maureen – Diana is left to deal with the aftermath. Fifteen years later and a now grown Diana (Uma Thurman) examines that aftermath of picking up the pieces in these massive Virginia Tech-style shootings. But while the premise is a smart and sensitive idea, even delivering a powerful movie, this particular script fails on many levels. To begin with, the movie depicts the Diana character as a bad girl who spends more time in the Principals office than the classroom and more time sleeping with every boy behind the bleachers. So it just doesn’t seem logical that after that behavior, coupled with a bloody tragedy, she’d grow up to be a college professor with a perfect husband, perfect home and perfect child. Granted we can all see ourselves in our children years later and we can remember our mistakes, but this movie’s biggest mistake is how it cuts back and forth from the past to the present. Every time the audience tries to get involved in whats it like to be trapped in a school bathroom with a killer holding a machine gun on you, the story cuts to the present and emotionally cuts us off. That is what gives this film only 2 tiaras at best.
