Macaulay Culkin is a funny looking chap. Was he ever a cute kid? I’m not sure. His popularity may well have been more based on his resemblance to Edvard Munch’s Scream. Is it any wonder that the Scream horror franchise traded on this image for its laughable villain, just as the demographic for Home Alone turned into the demographic for horror movies? Creepily precocious as a youth, Mac is now turning up as a grown up actor and it is unclear what kind of role he can play.
He seems uncomfortable in Saved!, despite being able to sit down for the entire movie. His self-pitying wheelchair bound brother of Mandy Moore’s evangelical teen queen is a truly odd performance. He looks too old for the role (he is) and any explanation that his accident held him back a year does not convince. I think we are all well acquainted now with the idea that teen movies can be ideal places to do light satire, and Saved! is a stab at a religious satire. It has a promising set up, but seems to be based around the wrong character (Jena Malone who has sex with her gay boyfriend because she believes Jesus told her to). The religious subplot aside this has all the standard teen trappings seen in Mean Girls, though slightly less automobile accidents (only slightly). I think certainly post Mean Girls that teen movies can only be interesting when they deviate from the formula: which Saved! certainly promises to do. However the film drifts from its promising set-up into the standard cliches and so our main enjoyment is watching a strange Culkin trying to make something of an underwritten role. It does not help that he has a voice a bit like Edward G.Robinson now. Culkin sidestepped teen movies in his own teens (too busy fighting his parents in the courts), and would never have played the lead – but you cannot make up for those lost chances as a funny faced twenty something.
Or maybe he just looks uncomfortable cos someone gave him a lumpy wheelchair. There is always that possibility.