Asking For It  ★★½

“YOU don’t get to tell my story; I do.”

So says one of the main characters in the well-intentioned but heavy-handed feminist drama Asking For It.

Writer/director Eamon O’Rourke’s 2021 debut feature tells the story of a young woman who is sexually assaulted and ends becoming part of an all-female vigilante group.

It’s relatively low-budget, but we’ll-made and acted and far from exploitation cinema.

But O’Rourke’s script is way too heavy-handed and spins out of control in the last act.

The approach is set with the prologue featuring Ezra Miller as the messianic, misogynist head of the radical Men First Movement (MFM)

Kiersey Clemons, Vanessa Hudgens and Alexandra Schipp play the three young lead characters in the vigilante group which also includes Australian actress Radha Mitchell.

The group actually runs a kind of isolated nightclub that is refuge to all sorts of societal outcasts, including some men. But the core are all kick-ass females who beat the crap out of domestic violence perpetrators and plan to  disrupt an MFM rally.

How they go about this tips the scales a little too far in the other direction for the narrative to not become problematic.

Good intentions, promisingly made but ultimately fails on the basic story-telling and character-identifying levels.