Say what you will about Elizabeth Banks, but she’s certainly not boring. Charlie’s Angels (2019). Cocaine Bear. Brightburn. Rita goddamn Repulsa in Power Rangers (2017). The Happytime Murders. I didn’t even like all of those movies (some of which I actively hated, in fact) and not all of them panned out with general audiences, but I can respect each and every one of them as a bold swing on Banks’ part. Banks may look like your typical dime-a-dozen Hollywood generically pretty blonde, but she takes interesting parts and makes interesting movies like few others in her class consistently do.
So here’s Skincare, in which Banks stars and also exec-produces. I hasten to add that Austin Peters is writing and directing here, alongside co-writers Sam Freilich and Deering Regan, all of whom make their feature debuts with this picture. With Banks involved, it’s certainly not boring. But with so little experience at the helm, it’s not coherent either.
Banks stars as Hope Goldman, an internationally renowned aesthetician running a massively successful skincare practice in Los Angeles, weeks away from launching her own bespoke line of skincare products. Unfortunately, because she’s sunk all her assets into her upcoming skincare line, she doesn’t have any money for this month’s rent on her studio.
Compounding the bad timing, an up-and-coming rival aesthetician (Angel, played by Luis Gerardo Mendez) opens up his own dermatology practice across the way. Worst of all, Hope’s e-mail and social media get hacked and she’s subjected to all manner of unspeakably horrific acts of online sexual harassment and assault. Her reputation and business are being actively sabotaged at a delicate point in her career, and the timing leads Hope to suspect that Angel may be involved.
On paper, it’s a decent premise. In practice, there are a number of reasons why it doesn’t work.
A big one is that even before shit hits the fan, Hope is hyped up by herself and others as the American Dream personified, a woman whose world-conquering success in a cutthroat business is enough to justify whatever petty backstabbing it takes for her to get ahead and stay ahead. We see this for ourselves in our first interactions between Hope and Angel, as Hope takes all manner of passive-aggressive swipes at this bright young up-and-comer. So it’s not much of a sea change when Hope vents her paranoid anger at Angel, with zero evidence that Angel is responsible for anything.
Put simply, Hope starts the movie as an entitled two-faced bitch and she ends the movie as an entitled two-faced bitch. Not much there in the way of layers or introspection or a development arc.
Granted, Hope is justifiably upset about the competitor setting up shop in her own backyard, an outrageous lapse in professional courtesy. And yes, Angel is a bit of a pompous dickbag. But that’s another huge problem with this movie: Everyone is an asshole.
Hope is a duplicitous bitch whose only response to any problem is to escalate matters beyond all control. Angel is an egomaniac with no respect for the shoulders he’s standing on or the feet he’s trampling. Their landlord (Jeff, played by John Billingsley) can’t utter a single sentence about anything other than the month’s rent. Jordan (Lewis Pullman) is a preening coked-up “life coach”. A local newscaster (Brett, played by Nathan Fillion, of all people) is a womanizing bastard. Armen (Erik Palladino) is a violent street tough who’s inexplicably devoted his entire life to Hope with no questions asked.
The only character in this movie who’s a hundred percent sympathetic is Hope’s assistant (Marine, played by MJ Rodriguez), and the character has so little agency or plot impact or independent motivation, she might as well be Hope’s smartphone. These characters are all so flat and cartoonishly unsympathetic, it’s impossible to take the film seriously as any kind of critique against superficial self-centered showbiz types. It’s a shallow movie about shallow people, and the filmmakers are nowhere near savvy enough to spin that into any kind of intelligent commentary.
Even as a parable about online harassment and character assassination, the movie doesn’t quite work. For one thing, it makes a huge difference that Hope is a public figure whose image is freely and readily accessible. That takes a lot away from the central point that this sort of online harassment could happen to anyone. Especially since there’s never any explanation as to how Hope got hacked in the first place, or any kind of constructive advice on what to do in response to online attacks. (There’s “change your passwords,” but that’s it.)
Things get even worse with the big reveal as to what’s going on. One of my top dealbreakers with any movie is idiot characters who make their own problems for no reason whatsoever, and that’s more or less exactly what we’ve got here. It’s the protagonist, the antagonist, and the supporting characters all escalating the conflicts and fucking each other over for no reason whatsoever. Even in Hope’s case, she consistently takes the most destructive and least sensible option long past the point of squandering all sympathy.
The upshot is that with so many despicable actions between so many unlikable characters who act with little if any apparent motivation, it gets difficult to track who deserves what. Given the simplistic plot, the simplistic characters, and the convoluted morality, it’s tough to parse out any kind of coherent theme or message that’s worth a damn.
Watching this movie, I kept thinking back to I Care a Lot, another movie with a ruthless and deeply unsympathetic blonde shark as our protagonist. But that movie had a smarter and more capable protagonist, it was always abundantly clear why she was being made to suffer, and it was all done to advance a unique and timely statement about U.S. healthcare with regard to the elderly. This movie also compares unfavorably to Nightcrawler, which actually works as a scathing satire of Hollywood superficiality and the American Dream. In large part because it had an unsettling and ruthless protagonist who did in fact develop over the course of the film, achieving his goals and rising to the top of his industry by virtue of being a total psychopath.
But all we get in this movie is an unlikeable protagonist who becomes her own undoing by being unlikeable. While half the other unlikeable characters die and the other half lives. Nothing new, nothing intelligent, nothing that makes any kind of sense. Nothing worth a damn at all.
What we’ve got here is an unfortunate case of naive newcomers punching way too far above their weight class. Banks and Pullman and Fillion are all entertaining to watch, but they deserved a better script and better direction than this. Skincare is a waste of a good premise, something that could’ve and should’ve been done justice by more experienced filmmakers. As it is, the movie hates its own characters so much that it fails to make any point beyond the fact that these people are awful. Which isn’t exactly a novel statement or a useful one for anyone who doesn’t live in SoCal.
Sorry, but this one’s a hard no for me.