Beautiful Creatures

Smart women who make foolish choices? Or daft chicks who’ve watched Bound once too often? Generically plucky lookers Dorothy (Susan Lynch) and Petula (Rachel Weisz) pay back the creepy men in their lives by whacking them in the overstyled pseudo-thriller Beautiful Creatures. And although they don’t get it on erotically like the characters played by Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon, these creatures are bound by a shared interest in fashion, revenge, and the kind of spiky-cool, consequence-free aesthetic so popular in the second- and third-generation offspring of Quentin Tarantino, especially among British cousins like noisy cutup Guy Ritchie. Here it’s British TV director Bill Eagles (Touching Evil) who makes his feature-film debut, getting busy on a script by Scottish playwright Simon Donald.

Dorothy’s boyfriend (Iain Glen) becomes violent when she hides his golf clubs; Petula’s barely seen, creepy bloke slaps her around apparently just because he can, and maybe because she looks like a poor man’s Marilyn Monroe who inspires gents to become swine. (Weisz, who shot this before Enemy at the Gates, goes bleach-blond for her art.) A detective (Alex Norton) turns out to be a sleazy scoundrel, too. If nothing matters — except the welfare of Dorothy’s beloved dog — then why care who lives, and who dies? The pooch, we know all along, will survive.