Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

How sad is this?

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Terrible, really. I caught this on HBO. Maybe on the big screen it would have been worse. Lousy acting, bad editing, worse direction, erratic plot, this "D" movie had it all. It was simply painful. I nominate this movie for top ten worst of all time. Run, run like your hair is on fire. Seriously. I've seen worse movies like "Creeping Terror" which was shot with a single camera and a single light source in many scenes. Or the classic "Plan 9 From Outer Space". What those two films had was "camp" value as a virtue of being awful. "New Best Friend" can't even rise to the "camp" level. There are no redeeming features, the master and all copies should be destroyed immediately for the betterment of mankind.

Please keep in my mind that I'm not classifying this as an artistically brilliant film. I'm not even classifying it as an artistically competent film. The film has "amateur" written all over it. From the dialogue to the plotting to...hell, the blocking of the actors. "New Best Friend" doesn't contain anything you wouldn't see in your average direct-to-video flick. I'm pretty sure the film went direct to video. I remember seeing the preview for the movie years ago, and for some reason it still stuck in my mind. I thought to myself, This looks like a direct-to-video flick, but...wait a minute, Taye Diggs is in it. I have no idea why Taye decided to take part in the flick. The film was released several years after he hit it big with "How Stella Got Her Groove Back." As you can imagine, he's probably the best actor in the film. The rest of the actors aren't bad either. Some of the acting is slightly hammy, but for the most part the performances didn't really take me out of the film. I haven't seen Mia Kirshner in many movies, but I liked her a lot in "Exotica." Not to mention I find her quite sexy. She's not what Hollywood would consider a "classic beauty," but I find her to be very gorgeous. It was cool to see Meredith Monroe play a bad girl. She played a much more innocent character on "Dawson's Creek." The plot is predictable and not much different than one you'd see in an average teeny-bopper soap opera. But what can I say? I was intrigued. It's good, trashy entertainment. Mia Kirshner's character goes through one of those only-in-the-movies transformations. She starts out a frumpy law student, who wears little makeup and has no fashion sense. All it takes is one wild party and one makeover from her new girlfriends, and viola! She's a drug-addicted slut! But what would a trashy teen melodrama be without implausible moments like that? The ending, to my surprise, doesn't contain a single twist. The writer/director didn't even attempt to make this film unpredictable.If you're looking to watch a deep, thought-provoking flick...this is NOT the film to see. But if you're simply looking to kill an hour and 30 minutes with good ol' trashy melodrama, "New Best Friend" is the film to see. Hey, let's face it. Every once in a while, you just need to kick back, check your brain at the door, and watch trashy flicks like these. It's fun after a hard day's work. The fact that almost all the actresses in the flick are hotties doesn't hurt either.

"New Best Friend" is another entry in the "steal another woman's life" sub-genre; the best of which are "Single White Female" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle"; the worse of which you can catch almost any afternoon on the Lifetime Channel. For some reason this type of identity theft happens exclusively to women.There are just two basic ways to play this type of story. You can make the woman evil at the beginning and let the audience watch knowingly as she hatches and implements her evil scheme. Or you use misdirection to make her appear a good person, as a seemingly unplanned series of events break in her favor until she is revealed to be evil in the climatic scene. Unfortunately the makers of "New Best Friend" could not decide how they wanted to play it and things crash and burn early. We first meet Alicia (Mia Kirshner) scamming the college's financial aid office for scholarship money. We now know that she is a bad person and will view all her subsequent activity with suspicion. But the director and editor apparently forgot that this revelation had been made and spend the next 50 minutes laying misdirection to make us think that Alicia is a good person. This introduces the only element of suspense, not about whether she is evil but about when the director and editor will wise up and stop wasting our time with transparent misdirection."New Best Friend" suffers more than most from the teen movie curse of a cast too old to be portraying undergraduate students. There are really only two big parts, Hadley (Meredith Monroe) and Alicia (Kirshner). They were 31 and 26 respectively at the time of the production. It almost works for the 26 year-old Kirshner when she plays the mousy version of Alicia but it becomes glaring when she is transformed into the glamed-up version of Alicia. Monroe's casting is simply a joke, about like having Nicholette Sheridan try to pass as a classmate on "Lizzie McGwire". She looks much closer to a mid-life crisis than to a term paper.The producers must have owed a lot of favors because this age issue extends to most of the supporting characters. Taye Diggs who plays the town sheriff is younger than most of the students.The basic setup is that Hadley and two other rich party girls (played by Dominque Swain-age 21 and Rachel True-age 35) are undergrad roommates at college. They share (as their student residence) a mansion that is nicer and better furnished than the mansion on Real World-New Orleans (a premise more believable than soccer moms playing students). Alicia moves into the mansion and begins to take over Hadley's life. At least that way Swain finally gets a roommate from her own generation so the two can have a lesbian scene. Swain's supporting performance is the only good thing about "New Best Friend" and her love scene with Kirshner is fantastic, so cool and artsy that it doesn't fit with any of the other segments, maybe it was subcontracted out to a good director and cinematographer.The unintentionally hilarious story is presented in a series of dreary flashbacks of rampant sex and nonstop parties, each proceeded by a shot of a comatose Alicia in a hospital bed. About half of Kirshner's screen time is spent lying motionless with a tube in her mouth. Not a good career move Mia.Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Bonner (Taye Diggs) is the sheriff of a sleepy New England town. The major attraction of the town is an exclusive college for the rich and trust-fund babies and when an OD happens he must get to the bottom of it as "quietly' as possible. The girl at the epicenter is Alicia (Mia Kirshner), a poor financial-strapped girl trying to make it as a law major who suddenly finds herself in the circle of the rich kids. Everyone becomes a suspect of wrong-doing as she cuts her way through the group taking what she wants and playing them against each other."Wild Things" meets "Cruel Intentions" would be the easiest way to summarize "New Best Friend". It plays pretty well as a mystery. The script itself is nothing original or special but the sexy cast (Kirshner, Meredith Monroe, Rachel True, and the always cute Dominique Swain.) pull it off. The direction is pretty decent. The film uses the camera well with interesting angles and lighting but the music is really fairly standard with it being mostly "hip and trendy" songs by no-name bands. If you like "Wild Things" and "Cruel Intentions" give this one a shot.