Hick | Movie review

And so it came to Chloë Grace Moretz, as it must to all child actors: puberty. Hick finds the former Kick-Ass kid tackling her budding hormones head-on, as a runaway testing out her newfound sexuality and learning some harsh lessons. Her home life an alcoholic mess, Moretz’s Luli hits the road with nothing but her Lolita sunglasses and the gun she recently received for her 13th birthday. Hitching her way to Las Vegas, she falls under the influence of two very poor role models: a mentally unstable cowboy (Eddie Redmayne) who wants to get in her age-inappropriate short-shorts and a sassy grifter (Blake Lively) who teaches Luli how to rob a convenience store.

Somewhere in Moretz and Lively’s scenes there’s a good movie—a sort of cross-generational Thelma & Louise. But Lively is but a brassy blip on Hick’s radar. The rest of the film follows Moretz and Redmayne—who repeatedly Jekyll-and-Hydes between refined Southern gentleman and rapey sociopath—with discomforting results. All of this amounts to little more than low-rent exploitation. Hick’s only memorable achievement is one seemingly impossible feat: providing Redmayne with the opportunity to out-icky his role in Savage Grace, in which he played a guy who had sex with his own mom.