• mild spoilers -

This film is not great. There are some oddities that make it altogether ridiculous. However, the story itself was compelling enough for me to want to see how it all shakes down.

Each of the four antagonists had lives that were twisted, grotesque, making them almost - not quite, but almost - sympathetic. As in, wow, they had screwed up lives, no wonder they turned out to be monsters.

But these entitled frat boys were indeed monsters. And they got what was coming to them. It's just somewhat unfortunate, to me, that they all didn't have any "face the judgment" moment in which they could face what they did.

And, that's the thing about crafting a story. For those who don't know how to do it (including me), there is the temptation to be realistic, and to feel unable to foist upon the reader something that demands too much suspension of belief...yet, most stories told do in fact require some degree of suspension of belief - that is, to not obsess about how realistic some detail is that is ultimately mundane in relation to the bigger picture of the story itself.

Or, is it? I suppose, the degree to which a viewers are willing to go along with the degree of demand to suspend belief is proportional to how engaged the story is - how much are we willing to forgive in order to get to the end and say, yeah, it was worth watching?