Bully is certainly a disturbing movie. This I'd preface with a couple of qualifying remarks, one is that if I had children in their earlier teens Bully would probably be as scary as any film ever made. And two I think most critics are wrong when they talk about the kids depicted in this film as being the contemptible dregs of American dysfunction.

It's my opinion that assessment is as wrong as the behavior of these kids would strike most people to be. For the part of the country they live in, I'd say that these kids aren't far from being pretty typical - save for the murdering. Kids take drugs and have sex at younger and younger ages these days and it's not just the dysfunctional losers and abusers. In the social setting where this film takes place, these are more or less normal teenage kids.

Bully is nonetheless haunting in it's cinema verity-style, directed by Larry Clark who gave us the controversial film Kids in 1995. The primary difference here is that Kids was mostly fictional and a bit more raw while Bully isn't quite as coarse, but could be considered more chilling as it is based on true events. Though a pretty loose version, it is based on a book written by Texas journalist Jim Schutze. There has been alot made of the discrepancy between the facts as presented by this film and the facts as they are presented in the book, but both chronicle the circumstances surrounding the very premeditated but terribly sloppy murder of a nasty south Florida delinquent who physically intimidated and verbally abused his friends until the decided to kill him.

In the American penal system "he had it coming" is evidently not a sound defense as all of the kids who took part in the murder are presently doing hard time. I can understand the argument that the film is exploitative and gratuitous with it's casual nudity and borderline pornographic sex scenes that are scattered liberally throughout the film. But Larry Clark is a film maker who believes in shooting from the gutter and it's an aesthetic, that in the case of this film, is fairly justifiable.

These kids aren't the Natural Born Killers that some reviewers would lead you to believe. They're merely teens in an environment where promiscuity and licentiousness is the norm and their desire to kill the title Bully in the film didn't strike me as malevolent, so much as it struck me as stupid. The bully in question is played by Nick Stahl (who suffered a similar fate in In The Bedroom) but in that film he was an absolute charmer. So much so that it's hard to buy him as such a complete asshole. As the Bully he's a kid who uses his looks and charm, to hide a violent, pathologically mean-spirited side.

Clark paints Stahl's Bully in an effective manner, you can see how he manages to get away with it, by being falsely apologetic and by completely snowing his parents. Stahl's Bully has fallen in love with himself and lives to see how far he can push the envelope of the power he lords over other people. He's the devil alright, all charm and lies but deep down as manipulative and evil as could be. Thus by the time his murderers (who he's beaten, raped, verbally abused, and homosexually exploited for money) begin to plot, you will be somewhat sympathetic toward their cause - however misguided and wrong.

Where Clark succeeds is in his ability to coax shockingly genuine performance out of his cast. They seem willing to do or say anything for him. Which may have something to do with their connection to the films Kids and Gummo. Both of which have taken on cult status with alot of teens. Clark definitely has a proclivity for this kind of ugly, unpleasant story, and his coarse but viscerally affecting filmmaking style serves Bully well. In fact, one has to wonder if his casting of young actors with their own troubled pasts -- like Miner (married at 17 to Macaulay Culkin, divorced two years later) and Renfro (drug and grand theft arrests) -- was accidental. Most likely not. But all of these performances are frighteningly authentic regardless of how Clark was able to capture them on film.

Rachel Miner (Joe the King) plays the pivotal role of 16-year-old Lisa Connelly, a wannabe-popular type who loses her virginity to Renfro (Apt Pupil), who is Stahl's best friend, punching bag and human experiment. Miner finds Renfro's plight romantic and becomes blindly devoted to this put-upon pretty boy. Right away she is pregnant and happy as could be about it. The news initially infuriates Renfro until he realizes that she is a staunch ally who is first to bring up the notion of murdering Stahl. She sees him berated, abused and literally pimped to perverted older men at the hands of his violent, latently homosexual "best friend," she slowly turns into the master simplemind of the plot to murder Bobby. One gaping hole in the film is what became of the pregnancy and the baby?

Her slutty girlfriend Ali (Bijou Phillips) isn't hard to recruit as she's already been raped (I believe anally) by Stahl, and the rest of the crew including her overweight cousin, well they're not exactly professionals either. Even before they get around to the deed they start bragging to people at school about what they're going to do. And this is where the film really founders. From the time they start planning their haphazard crime, which means recruiting several other "not-ready-for-hard-time" players, to the time the deed is actually committed the film bogs down badly.

All of the suspense is lost in this sluggish middle portion of the film. One minute they have a reasonably workable plan and the next they're dropping acid and smoking weed and wondering if they're going to need more bats. Then they go play video games for hours and have more sex and the film loses it's immediacy badly. It gets to the point that when they actually do murder Stahl, you all but lost interest in the whole thing.

After the murder the kids are racked with paranoia about evidence they left behind (Renfro has to go back to recover a forgotten knife sheath) and they all kind of drift away in a haze of pot smoke hoping that it will all magically go away. Soon the kids turn on one another and one even calls the cops to report the crime. Sadly this part of the film is also totally devoid of tension or drama. The ending plays out like one of those A&E investigations. And all of the shock-value that was so palpable in the first act, really goes down the drain. Clark is also a little too enamored of laying the irony on thick. He goes out of his way to demonstrate how most of these kids' parents are totally oblivious to the extreme nature of their children's misbehavior.

If you think this review has been a total spoiler, I'm leaving out plenty of plot points that figure in, one of which that makes the Revenge of the Nerds posse, seem more cold-blooded than I've painted them thus far.
And I'm sure that most civilized people would take exception to some of my opinions regarding this film (I can't overestimate the amount of sex, obscenity and drug abuse that this film graphically depicts) still Clark dares to look the truth in it's bloodshot beady little eye and he doesn't blink. There's always something to be said for that.