Review of movie Assassination Nation

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Rating:3/5

In Sam Levinson’s needlessly self-serious “Assassination Nation,” a gruesome, modern-day spin on the 17th century Salem witch trials by way of Mean-Girls-Gone-Wild, the central character Lily is an 18-year-old, opinionated high-school senior with a zero-f*cks-given attitude. She wears “Fatal Attraction” socks for kicks and sports kiddies’ arm floats at the pool for no apparent reason. Her aura of indifference is so extreme that when she’s rightfully called into the principal’s office to answer for her pornographic class drawings, she shrugs it off at first. Then she launches into a feminist defense of her art as an expression of how hard it is for women to exist in the misogynistic ranks of the selfie-obsessed social media. “It’s not about the nudity,” she explains to her genuinely inquisitive teacher. “It’s about the thousands of naked selfies you took to get just one right.”