‘Asking for It’ Review: An Avenging Girl Gang Goes Not Wild Enough in a Slickly Styled, Shallow Rape-Revenge Thriller
variety.comJessica Kiang On paper, the premise of writer-director Eamon O’Rourke’s feature debut seems irresistible: An all-girl gang of abuse survivors, seriously upskilled in the use of baseball bats, bombs and butterfly knives, roams heartland America exacting vengeance on Bad Men — which here means #AlmostAllMen.
But in execution (and there are precious few of those), “Asking for It” is too much like its cardboard heroines: edgy on the outside, empty within.
It’s the “Charlie’s Angels” freeze-pose of rape-revenge movies.The opening — a montage culled from the lower reaches of the collective incel id — promises better.
In a flurry of YouTube clips and TikTok testimonials, we’re introduced to the fully loathsome Mark Vanderhill (Ezra Miller), a pick-up artist turned Men’s Rights crusader whose mantra of male dominance, expressed through the subjugation of women and the undiscerning worship of the submachine gun, might seem exaggerated if you have been in a coma for the last couple of decades.
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