Kate (Andie MacDowell) is a lonely respectable forty year old head mistress at a boarding school who gets together every week with her friends to tell horrible stories about their week and discover who is the saddest. Then Kate meets Jed an ex-pupil whom she begins to have an affair with. Soon the affair begins to turn into a relationship and she is no longer sad. Jed, her romance isn’t charismatic nor is he charming or likeable and is simply a one-dimensional character who we never get to know much of, so we never care when something happens to him.
I felt writer John McKay didn’t show enough of his character to let the audience like him and simply was resorted to becoming a bad plot device. The ending of the film becomes not only corny and hokey but extremely far-fetched with the death of a main character brought on by a lame plot of deception. If my friends ever did this to me like they did to her, I would not only never speak to them again but I would banish them from my life. Yet they make up. Why? Because writer McKay takes the easy way out and goes for the safe happy ending.
I would have liked to see him take a risk and go for the bittersweet ending. Also, Kate has a baby which was rather confusing and felt like another cheesy plot device used to bring upon sympathy for these purely unlikable characters. I was rather taken by the three female leads in the beginning because they all have such unique characteristics. Kate is the happy go lucky but stone cold character who is often beaten down by her friends. Janine (Imelda Stanton) is the rough and tough police sergeant who is too rugged to get a man, and Molly (Anna Chancellor) is the alluring man eater.
The character Molly, though hot, is probably the most despicable character I’ve seen in a movie in years and how she’s involved in the ending really made me angry. The last ten minutes is devised of a good old fashion women moment where the girls gather to talk about who’s the happiest and their new relationships which happen to pop up near the last five minutes. Not worthy of the theatres but worthy for the “Lifetime” crowd, “Crush” is a terrible and manipulative femal-centric drama.