The Cruel Intentions reboot just doesn’t click

At first glance, Prime Video’s Cruel Intentions (a loose, modern-day adaptation of the beloved 1999 film of the same name) has all the familiar elements going for it: There’s sex, creepy step-siblings, nighttime dips in the pool, cocaine stashed in a cross necklace, and even a catchy “Bittersweet Symphony” remix. But all the nostalgia in the world can’t make up for how utterly meh this eight-episode drama feels in comparison to the Sarah Michelle Gellar vehicle from a quarter century ago.

Created by Phoebe Fisher and Sara Goodman (the minds behind Prime’s I Know What You Did Last Summer series), Cruel Intentions is set at the elite Manchester College in Washington, D.C., and centers on ultra-privileged step-sibs Caroline (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lucien (Zac Burgess) and their classmates. There’s sweet and innocent Annie (Savannah Lee Smith), who’s also the U.S. Vice President’s daughter; CeCe (Sara Silver), who talks a mile-per-minute and worships the ground Caroline walks on; frat boys Blaise and Scott (portrayed by John Harlan Kim and Khobe Clarke, respectively); and fervently anti-Greek-life activist Beatrice (Brooke Lena Johnson). Sean Patrick Thomas is the film’s sole returning cast member—except here, he’s tackling Professor Hank Chadwick.

Minus the slightly older characters and heavy focus on Greek life, the show more or less follows the same premise as the ’99 movie (a retelling of Dangerous Liaisons, which was itself an adaptation of the 1782 French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses): Awful step-siblings with burning sexual tension make a bet in order to maintain their reputations and power. Caroline, who’s determined to get Annie to pledge for her sorority, asks the extremely horny Lucien to seduce the VP’s daughter in exchange for the one girl he’s never been able to have: her. “Me, the way you’ve always wanted, for up to an hour” doesn’t quite hit the same as Sarah Michelle Gellar’s iconic “you can put it anywhere” line, but it deserves a couple of points for effort.

Honestly, the Caroline/Lucien/Annie triangle itself is…fine? Cruel Intentions’ biggest problem is that it just really, really doesn’t work as an ensemble show. Instead of spending ample time developing Lucien and Annie’s relationship and getting viewers invested in them, the series gets bogged down by a million unnecessary storylines. The Greek life stuff starts to drag by the second episode, and frankly, most of the drama is pretty boring. (Are sororities too exclusionary? Should frats be banned? Who cares? Get back to the juicy stuff!) Plenty of screen time is also spent on CeCe and Professor Chadwick’s relationship, as well as the complicated dynamic between Blaise and Scott, but both storylines are trope-y, predictable, and strangely out of step with the main premise. All of the characters are clearly supposed to be nods to the ’99 version (for example, CeCe is the counterpart of Selma Blair’s Cecile), but it feels like half of them got lost on their way to Gossip Girl and are just wandering around here in confusion.