Interesting idea and storyline which didn't quite work.

When you see the film, maybe you will feel as dissatisfied with the ending as I did. I didn't really know who to root for in the movie, Taye Diggs looked bored as the detective, the rest of the characters seem so one-dimensional and unpleasant.

If the victim Alicia(Mia Kirschner) had been more of a nice girl, we might actually have enjoyed seeing the plot unfold and the perpetrator brought to justice. The problem was that she was as bitchy as the other girls, turning from sweet girl to conniving opportunistic cokehead. I can't understand the moral message of this film, and as a detective story and thriller it doesn't work.

Confused and confusing who-dun-it filmed in a relentlessly jerky TV style with at least 95% close-ups that make it even more difficult to follow the action. Just about everyone in the whole cast of about ninety people receive a close-up. The viewer has no idea whether they are important to the plot or not. Only the investigator himself and the headmaster – in a much smaller role – make any impression. Even the victim herself is not firmly delineated. Nor are her friends – if they are "friends"! It's impossible to tell who is who! Who are the "good" people and who are the rotten apples? And at the end of the movie, we are just left in a state of complete confusion. In fact, we are even more confused than we were while the plot was jerkily unfolding. Who was the best friend of who? As far as the principle plot and all the sub-plots were concerned, virtually nothing was explained, nothing was made clear. The only plot item that was made quite emphatically was the small and rather insignificant point that the racist headmaster didn't cotton to the sheriff. As a result, the headmaster sought to have the sheriff sacked, and possibly did so – but even this was not made crystal clear!

This film may be a bit derivative of the two titles I hint at in my one-line summary, but it by no means a truly bad film. It's a tad misdirected, somewhat dragged out and definitely not all-around well-acted, but it is not bad movie. I won't claim I watched this for any other reason than the fact that it features some of the hottest young actresses in newer times, but I will make a point of what happened when I sat down to watch it. I didn't take my eyes off the screen. I didn't get up for a minute or two, and I never really felt like I was wasting time by watching it. For a while, the last couple of weeks, I have had trouble finding a film that really got my attention and kept it. Not since watching Requiem For a Dream have I been following a film so intensely. I didn't want to miss a thing watching this movie, and that says a lot, considering my almost ADD-like short attention span. The plot is not particularly original, but it is interesting. The pacing is mostly good, but around the middle and near the end, it seems to slow down, in order to drag out the material in order to reach the minimum limit for the length of a feature film, something that really hurts the film(it probably should have been a short... or maybe there should have been written more story or more characters). The acting isn't all good, but the four leads give good performances(even Meredith Monroe of Dawson's Creek fame... who saw that coming?). The twists and plot developments are interesting, but the mystery of who committed the crime is almost impossible to solve for the viewer until the very end, where it's revealed. Even worse, it makes said mystery seem very simple, since it turned out to be the very person I suspected from the very beginning. The non-linear time-line works fairly well, but it does get somewhat confusing in several parts, because it's not perfectly clear if we're seeing a flashback or something that goes on 'right now'. There is a fair amount of sex and drug use in this film, so it's not for the easily offended or the faint of heart. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I believe most people will too, if they give it a chance. I recommend this to fans of the genre, and I urge anyone watching it to give it a fair chance to win you over. It's uneven, but it's not a bad film. 6/10