Crush brings a war hammer to the table when it comes to the idea of 'hitting every single part of the youth demographic'. It's a thriller featuring tae kwon do championships, house sitting in a Panic Room mansion, a sexy mystery girl and a brand new rockin' song on the soundtrack in every second scene. The actors are young and glamorous and so is the Perth scenery. The trouble is that all of this rollicking-in-theory content is at the service of a story and film-making which continually nudge at the borders of dumbness, and which ultimately make a leap right into its crazy heart.
Julian (Chris Egan) can no longer compete in his beloved tae kwon do on his USA home turf after a minor underage drinking scandal, so now he has to slum it in Australia while studying architecture. With his next big tourney approaching, Julian figures he'll get a bit of R&R in while carrying out his new temp job of housesitting the mansion of a rich family who are about to holiday in Paris. The dad has installed a Sliver-like system of security cameras throughout the house, and warns Julian that his niece might drop over while the family's away to use the mansion's swimming pool.
Before you can say "Fatal Attraction", Anna (Emma Lung) materialises by the swimming pool in a red bikini. She is well sultry, and about five minutes later Julian is already having understandable fantasies of her licking his face. This immediately creates a ton of problems – he's already got a girlfriend (Brooke Harmon), plus Anna apparently has keys to the otherwise secure house, plus Julian is supposed to be taking it easy before the big fight.
Development in these thrillers about obsession needs to be craftily ratcheted up by degrees in order to keep things believable. Crush is very shaky in this respect, moving alternately in extreme leaps or underwhelming shuffles. Anna's behaviour as she hangs around the house is pretty inscrutable. One scene begins with the decent threat of the lights suddenly going out. It ends with Julian 'rescuing' his girlfriend from a slightly regurgitating toilet.
Julian frequently has flashbacks to scenes which occurred just five seconds earlier, another omen of bad film-making. He is seen with his university friends in authentically Australian campus computer labs, but his two mates are scripted and acted far more like American college frat boys than Australians, even though they occasionally say "mate". Combined with Julian's nationality being American, this feels like further slight desperation to play to the international market, which I wouldn't mind if this film was better.
Unfortunately, at the moment of potential maximum intrigue concerning Anna's origins, a revelation occurs whose proportions are so ludicrous that any viewer remotely cynical at this point (which I believe will be the majority of viewers) will topple completely offside. I then experienced the film's conclusion as dumb and embarrassing.
Chris Egan does okay as Julian, and Emma Lung wrings a few good moments out of an impossible, ridiculously scripted part as Anna. The film's glamour, high production values and unpaid-off hints of intrigue actually make it pretty easy to watch, even through some overbearing faults and naffness, but the finale is irredeemable. I think the real reason Crush invites derision is that it goes all out to be a rousing cross-market genre piece, yet for all its heavy-handedness, doesn't pull it off, and ends up prompting jokey cynicism instead.
