Rolling Stone
"...Nobody does sleek, smirking menace like Slater. And Diaz is a firecracker..." 12/10/1998 p.132Entertainment Weekly
"...Berg's scandalous sick-joke thriller is packed with rude and clever twists....The cast is terrific..." -- Rating: A- 12/11/1998 p.53 Total Film
"...The jokes are good, Diaz plays the bride from Hell with relish and you have to admire the crazed energy of the whole thing..." 10/01/1999 p.99 Uncut
"[With a] gung-ho cast?all of whom bring their A-game." 10/01/2005 p.146 TIME Magazine 8 of 10
Week after week, the sanctity of human life, the moral niceties of medical ethics, the nobility of self-sacrifice. After all that tenderness, it's easy to see why bright young Peter Berg, one of the Chicago Hope ensemble, would want to try a little purgative transgressiveness. Hence the very black comedy Very Bad Things, which he has written and directed. In it, five thirtysomething guys from a Los Angeles suburb go off to Las Vegas for a bachelor party a week before one of them is to be married. It turns wild: a call girl accidentally gets killed, a security guard gets murdered, the boys--led by Christian Slater, doing a nice, nasty turn spouting pop-psych Nietzscheanisms--get started on a cover-up. Guilt and panic soon lead to lethal wrangles, then to variously colorful comeuppances. Meantime, Cameron Diaz is sublimely screwy as the single-minded bride determined not to let anything--including the deadly mishaps that keep shrinking the wedding party--spoil her nuptials. Within the chicly amoral terms Berg sets--and brutally enforces--Diaz is curiously believable. So is the way in which stunned calm (we're going to get away with this thing) and hysteria (no, we're not) alternate among the well-played accidental criminals. We do find points of identification with them. And heaven knows, some of us are fed up to the teeth with movies glossily restating humane sentiments. - Richard Schickel
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