Critical: The Ruins

Critical is a series of examinations about media in popular culture. It's an explicit look, which means those who don't want key plot points revealed to you should likely avoid continuing. Critical does not even know what the word spoilers MEANS.

There are really only three moments in this movie that didn’t work for me. Three really annoying, glaring moments, but only three moments nonetheless. Barring that, I had a much better time with The Ruins than I expected.

The beginning is a bit slow. 4 Americans vacationing in Mexico hook up with some other travelers and make plans to visit a Mayan ruin that is so secret, it isn’t even on the map. Well, anyone with half a brain cell can what happens once they get to those ruins, and it’s not a picnic. Once they finally get to those ruins, twenty minutes in, the movie turns into a very satisfying experience. Did we really need a first act that shows Americans being lazy at their hotel, getting drunk ad making out with strangers, and implied sex off-camera? No, not really. Maybe if the obviously Final Girl wasn’t annoying in every way, you could excuse it, but she really is. She doesn’t want to leave the pool, doesn’t mind getting so drunk she almost cheats on her boyfriend, has no compunctions about almost blowing off her friends the next day just to stay in bed, and whines all the way to the ruins. Once there, she continues to do as many annoying things as possible, even going so far as to indirectly kill an innocent child while throwing a temper tantum. She’s just not likeable.

This leads me to the first moment that doesn’t work. At one point, one of the girls begins to lose her mind. You would, too, if you had sentient vines crawling around inside your body. You, too, might become obsessed with surgically removing those vines yourself. But imagining that your best friend (The Annoying Final Girl) is having sex with your boyfriend is a bit of a stretch. Yes, we know Final Girl has no compunctions about trying to hook up with other people when she’s drunk, but that entire sequence just rankled me. Conflict for no reason, and the film would be better off without it.

Next up, Vine Girl gives her boyfriend a handjob under the covers while in the same tent as Final Girl, and I’m sorry, but it comes out of nowhere and really makes no sense to me. Your mileage may vary on that one, though.

The final moment that didn’t work for me is when the girls descend into the ruins to try and retrieve a lost cell phone. It’s all perfectly good up to the point where all the vines on the walls come to life, and it just looks bad. The vines movement throughout the rest of the movie is excellent and believably, but here it looked like CGI and totally took me out of the moment.

Aside from those three moments, The Ruins was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes and I’d recommend it for general viewing.