Asking for It

Asking for It

Ever since it became popular in the 1970s, the “rape revenge” subgenre has never gone away. Riding on the coattails of increasing media representation discourse, #MeToo and calls for more women both in front of and behind the camera, it’s no wonder that in recent years we’ve seen a reappearance of rape revenge films, such as “Elle” or “Promising Young Woman.”

However, Eamon O’Rourke’s feature debut as writer/director, “Asking for It,” is like that guest who shows up to the party late they don’t bring anything with them and they’re also not any fun to talk to.

The film follows small-town waitress Joey (Kiersey Clemons) as she befriends Regina (Alexandra Shipp), a regular at the diner where she works. After running into an old school acquaintance leads to date rape, Regina introduces Joey to her friends who happen to be an all-female gang of vigilantes called the Cherry Bombers: hot-headed Beatrice (Vanessa Hudgens), and their learned advisors Sal (Radha Mitchell) and Fala (Casey Camp-Horinek).

United through traumatic experiences at the hands of the patriarchy, these women have turned personal quests for revenge into a broader mission of making misogynists suffer for what they did. They’ve been planning their biggest mission yet: targeting Men’s First Movement (MFM) leader Mark Vanderhill (Ezra Miller), whose toxic but popular rhetoric is equal parts men’s rights nonsense and incel vitriol.

Cinematic bread and butter for a film like this is watching the band come together which makes it even weirder how little time is given to this. But most of this movie’s characters are poorly defined; much of its cast Clemons especially are clearly talented but cannot create something out of nothing, which is precisely what this film gives them.

“Asking for It” is so heavy handed and clumsy that it forgets to have dialogue characters don’t talk with each other so much as at each other, making long-winded statements only prompted by the narrative’s whims. Which member of the Cherry Bombers gets a backstory (always tragic, of course) feels like a random drawing amongst the group; about half of these women are little more than glorified extras as far as character development goes.

Regina, illogically enough, is among the utterly indistinct. Though the film signals that Joey’s bond is supposed to be strongest with Regina, it does next to nothing to earn your investment in their relationship besides being the one who recruits Joey, she has no defining characteristics.

Mostly it’s Beatrice who dominates these scenes; her characterization reads mostly as Vanessa Hudgens wanting to play against type by being as confrontational and pierced as possible. At one point she puts on a bright pink strap-on it’s part of some nefarious scheme intended to be inflammatory but which doesn’t make a lick of sense.

It’s almost as if O’Rourke did a binge-watch of the rape-revenge canon in preparation there’s a scene in a parking lot outside an old movie theater with “Thelma and Louise” among the titles listed on the marquee, for example but failed to do the necessary narrative work to understand how they function.

Even on a basic level, like having an antagonist or using a villain effectively, things are bungled. Vanderhill is the big bad until he isn’t anymore, supplanted by slimy human trafficker Sherriff Morrill (David Patrick Kelly), and then another third-act baddie who’s more personal to Joey comes back into play again. Plenty of movies have successfully handled multiple antagonists or managed to nest them together; “Asking For It” just gets confused.

“Asking for It” is like a shitty puppet show everyone here feels like a flat paper cut-out yanked haphazardly by painfully obvious strings, mouthpieces for the guy standing right behind the curtain, who talks in meaningless platitudes about agency and controlling one’s own story.

What’s most confusing to me is that Eamon O’Rourke a white man would spend all this time and effort making his first feature about a Black woman who at one point delivers an extremely heavy handed speech about reclaiming her own narrative when this movie is so clearly not his own. I’m not saying that white men cannot or should not make movies about Black women. But it does not seem like he knows what story he’s telling here very well, if at all. None of it makes sense in ways that are truly impressive.

Watch Asking for It For Free On Gomovies.