If you're OK with the idea of Dangerous Teenage Liaisons, and assuming you can get past the archly mannered performance of Ryan Phillippe in the first couple of reels, Cruel Intentions is surprisingly easy to sit still for. Phillippe gets (much) better as he goes on, and Sarah Michelle Gellar is eminently watchable as one of the more famous (thanks to the movies) conniving bitches in literary history. Reese Witherspoon, so much fun as white trash in Freeway, gets shafted with a largely thankless good girl role, but you can't have everything.

The story has remained much the same, morphing the French aristocrats of the original into spoiled New York high-schoolers stirring up shit over summer break. For this update, Kathryn Merteuil (Gellar) has a coke problem and stepbrother Sebastian Valmont (Phillippe) posts nude photographs of discarded girlfriends on the Internet. Witherspoon's Annette Hargrove has advertised her chastity with a deeply felt article published in Seventeen magazine about the importance of being in love before making love. Kathryn and Sebastian stake a wager on whether he can have his way with this girl before school starts. If Kathryn wins, she gets Sebastian's beloved Jaguar. And if Sebastian wins, he gets to do Kathryn in the position of his choice.

In case you're not familiar with any of the previous versions (they include Roger Vadim's Les Liaisons Dangereuses [1959], Jean-Claud Carierre's Valmont [1988], and Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons [1988]), the moral dilemma comes when Sebastian finds himself falling in love with Annette, an unforeseen consequence of his cocksure endeavor to get her into bed.

Writer/director Roger Kumble brings this off in mostly high style, only occasionally biting off more than he can chew. The film is full of appropriately crass dialogue, well-observed character tics, and fine performances. The most voyeuristic bits are pulled off Wild Things style, with a shameless self-awareness, as when Gellar is photographed tongue-kissing the naive Cecile (a too-awkward Selma Blair), another Sebastian conquest-to-be, in loving close-up. Gumble outdoes Wild Things, however, by daring to let a real relationship blossom amid all this hip cynicism. When Sebastian finally gives himself up to Annette, the result is credibly romantic.

The overtures toward out-and-out nastiness are hit-and-miss. For instance, I liked the look of horror on Cecile's mom's face when Gellar revealed that her daughter was seeing, gasp, a black man. Less successful is a brief blackmail subplot that revolves around a homosexual tryst but feels uncomfortably like gay-baiting.

Finally, Kumble really blows it in the last 10 minutes, which are absolutely unconvincing. Particularly bad is the final sequence, a half-hearted excuse for a comeuppance that's juiced up by having The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" swell on the soundtrack. Despite these rather significant gripes, I found myself enjoying this picture a lot more than I might have expected. On the whole, Cruel Intentions is a sly, silly, mostly well-crafted diversion that's no trash classic, but has little to apologize for — if only all of the "teen" movies in Hollywood's recent revival could be this well-acted, or this entertaining. We should be so lucky.