Cult classic film from 1999 cruel intentions had many flaws (decent acting director among them), but one thing it understood was the power of melodrama. Loosely based on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel about the French aristocracy, Les Liaisons Dangereusesthe film starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Philippe as rival rich step-siblings willing to do whatever it takes for school social status and the innate pleasure of outdoing each other, with Reese Witherspoon playing their naïve bait. It was deeply camp and outrageously silly high school cruelty movie: Clueless meets The craft.

Prime Videos reboot completely misunderstands that hokey appeal. The action has been moved from the Manchester Prep school of the original film to Manchester College, an elite university just outside of Washington, DC. Sarah Catherine Hook is Caroline, the outwardly good yet secretly amoral Gellar figure, who is president of the Delta Phi sorority and desperate to get vice president Annie Grover’s (Savannah Lee Smith) daughter to join.

She recruits her stepbrother Lucien (Zac Burgess, not even charming enough for this role), to seduce Annie into Delta Phi, promising him the ultimate reward—a night in bed with herself—if he obliges. The suspense is meant to hinge on bad boy Lucien accidentally falling for good girl Annie and ruining all the intrigue.

Gone are the high stakes of a simple cat-and-mouse game, making sex look very boring, and leaving us with an extraordinarily boring story about sororities that non-Americans will struggle to understand, let alone care about .

It’s all incredibly boring. Caroline is supposed to be two-faced – mean on the inside but irresistibly charming on the outside – yet Hook is leaden, so without warmth (Gellar was probably brash if nothing else) that it’s impossible to believe Annie would fall for her pretend sisterhood.

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Artless sidekick CeCe is still here (Cecile in the original, now Caroline’s sorority sister and obsessed loyal servant played by Sara Silver) but there is no longer a side seduction of her to further showcase Lucien and Caroline’s manipulative skills. Instead, we just watch her throw sorority parties and pursue a boring budding romance with a professor, and are encouraged to think she’s odd because she says absurd things like, “What if fascists are just power-hungry philanthropists?”

There are no longer any real barriers between love interests Annie and Lucien (in the 1999 film, her counterpart has vowed to save herself for marriage – in Les Liaisons Dangereuesshe’s married), so what’s the big deal if they sleep together? No one has any chemistry, and – since it’s all over eight episodes – what little momentum there is quickly dissipates, even with the occasional sex tape or embezzlement scandal.

Crucially, there is an awful lot of talk about the Greek system of sororities and fraternities, endless references to the pledges and rush and the murky scandal that puts the system in jeopardy, as if it were a matter of life and death. Instead of enjoyable mischief, we have self-serious politicization. It is impossible to care.

Co-written by Phoebe Fisher (who, perhaps tellingly, also wrote 2021 I know what you did last summer reboot), this rehash in style to the 1999 film, with clear homages: the sports car on the highway, The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” in the credits, and Sean Patrick Thomas playing CeCe’s lover in both versions.

But it’s also a descendant of the kind of guilty pleasure drama that’s littered the TV landscape since that film: it wants to be expensive and ambitious as Gossip Girland full of high school intrigue that Pretty Little Liars. Trying to emulate both hammy 90s classics and light-hearted Noughties high school comics without embracing the melodrama, it ends up falling short either.

It’s flat and virtuous, stripping away all the silliness and leaving in its place a silly drama about rich people rising above absolutely nothing. cruel intentions? More like no tension at all.

“Cruel Intentions” is streaming on Prime Video