I can hardly imagine the tortured existence that today's teen TV star must lead. Having to act pure and moral season after season, preaching hollow messages about abstinence and the war on drugs … It must be just terrible for them. If I had to spend five years acting nice, I'd probably jump at the chance to play somebody loathsome, too.

So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a few of the boys and girls of the WB have chosen to rebel. The players are Dawson's Creek star James Van Der Beek and 7th Heaven's Jessica Biel, and the vehicle they're steering toward The Land of Badass is The Rules of Attraction, an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' book chronicling the emptiness of modern college life.

The plot of the movie seems close enough to your typical WB melodrama. Bisexual Paul (Ian Somerhalder) is interested in drug dealer Sean (Van Der Beek), who is obsessed with Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon). Lauren used to go out with Paul and now has a crush on Sean, but is saving herself for Victor (Kip Pardue), who is in Europe for much of the movie. Her roommate Lara (Biel) tries to have sex with anything that moves, and usually succeeds.

The plot is pretty dumb, but that isn't what will repel most viewers. The characters are what makes this movie unpleasant to watch. Every person in the film is tragically flawed, and nobody is particularly likable, the two WB alums in particular.

The direction in this movie is, to put it bluntly, terrible. The target of my ire in this case is Roger Avery (Killing Zoe). From the very beginning of the film, Avery seems more interested in showing off how stylish he can make a film than in creating believable characters or a connection with the audience.

Watching this movie was like reading The Big Book of Film Techniques That Piss Me Off. Avery runs film backwards throughout the movie, utilizes a couple of completely unnecessary split-screens, and at one point runs the film at high speed for five minutes . He seems so caught up in what he can do that he forgets what he's supposed to be doing.

What he's supposed to be doing is creating characters that we can believe in. I didn't like the characters in The Rules of Attraction because they were immoral. The main characters in High Fidelity and Ghost World were pretty bad people, and those are two of my favorite recent films.

In real life I have met John Cusack's character from High Fidelity, and I was friends with Ghost World's Enid in high school. I've never met any of the people in The Rules of Attraction, and I don't think that it's possible for me to meet them. They don't exist in real life. The decisions they make aren't governed by emotions or logic, but by where the plot needs to go.

The movie isn't all bad, though. When Avery puts away his bag of tricks and lets the movie flow, it is at times very funny. In particular, Russell Sams achieves five minutes of drunken comedy gold before stumbling off screen, reminding us of a time when Jim Carrey was actually funny.

But for every scene in Rules that's entertaining, there's another that is painful to watch. In his adaptation, Avery has unfortunately chosen to highlight Bret Easton Ellis' most well-known technique – shocking the audience – and his movie suffers as a result. At different points in the film, the audience is forced to watch a rape, a two-minute-long suicide sequence, four other attempted suicides, a drug-related beating and a professor soliciting sexual favors from his students.

If a director is going to make me sit through all that, he'd better have a damn good reason for it. It's the lack of a damn good reason, though, that ultimately dooms this film. At the end of the movie, I didn't feel any more enlightened than before; on the contrary, I felt worse. All the sadistic actions that the characters perform in the movie aren't being used to make a greater point about our society or the ways we interact with each other, but to generate shock. The movie's final message seems to be "Shit happens. Deal with it."

Frankly, I didn't need to pay $8.50 to be told that.