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By Dan Leone

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MOST BIG- screen book adaptations are measured by their ability to capture the spirit, if not the letter, of their sources. But what, pray tell, if that Rosetta stone is nothing but noxious hot air? It's a concept that nags your weary skull by the end credits of this film based on Bret Easton Ellis's novel of collegiate carnage amongst the egotistical young and restless since, technically, it can be considered a success: Someone has indeed managed to make a movie that's just as vapid and narcissistic as the author's swaggering-cock prose. Sean (James Van Der Beek, looking more droog than Dawson), a self-destructive fuck machine, is in love with the "pure" Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon). She digs Sean's morose-but-in-a-cute-way vibe but is really smitten with Victor (Kip Pardue), a semi-boyfriend on a temporary European, and permanent frontal lobe, vacation. It seems she once briefly dated the bisexual Paul (Ian Somerhalder), who carries a major torch for – you guessed it – Sean. While it might be possible to harvest satire deeply buried underneath Ellis's legendary literary pretensions (see Harron, Mary), director Roger Avary (Killing Zoe) seems aware that the main irony here is the word "attraction" in a work primarily preoccupied with repulsion. He brings more chops to the material than it warrants, thus treating us to an array of tricks – split screens, backward sequences, cut-up chronology – for smoke and mirrors amid the people-equal-shit chic. A few isolated vignettes (a truly harrowing suicide sequence, Faye Dunaway and Swoosie Kurtz drinking cocktails and chewing scenery, Victor's bravura European jaunt) shine like diamonds in the dung, but in the end, you're not left wondering whether it's pleasure or pain these campus hedonists leave in their wake. The only question remaining is whether the movie smells like aimless teen-spirit nihilism or just outright stinks. (David Fear)