The Prodigies [La nuit des enfants rois] (2011)

(In French, On TV, April 2019) I did not approach La nuit des enfants rois with the best of intentions—after all, I read the original Bernard Lenteric novel back in the mid-1990s and thought it was gratuitously depressing tripe even back then—which, considering that it’s about misunderstood nerds taking revenge at a time when I felt that I was a misunderstood nerd, was something that spoke for itself. To its disservice, the film does leave out some of the more ludicrous material of the novel, but doesn’t do much to fix the book’s basic shortcomings and adds a whole lot more new dumb stuff. Now feeling like a paean to misunderstood teenage psychopaths, The Prodigies takes delight in mistreating its teen geniuses until they get to become vicious criminals with thoughts of global destruction. Our protagonist isn’t much better, raising all sorts of questions about why the film actually exists. Worse yet: Director Antoine Charreyron’s The Prodigies is hyper-violent, except that it doesn’t have the maturity to justify this level of gore and violence. The way it revels in an extended rape sequence that becomes a driver for the film’s entire second half is a troubling indicator of the filmmaker’s lack of maturity. Executed as an animated film, it does attempt a bit of style, but the animation itself is amateurish to the point of nullifying any stylistic aspirations. To put it bluntly: the film is not stylish, it’s just cheap. Despite a few (very few) visually ambitious moments, The Prodigies is a chore to sit through—it’s immature yet violent in ways that amplify the bad mixture of the two, and it’s fundamentally ugly to watch most of the time.