Kids are not all right in 'Twelve'

To this day there's a debate over "St. Elmo's Fire," Joel Schumacher's 1985 Brat Pack classic. Romantic coming-of-age movie? Or despicable yuppie propaganda? Twenty-five years later, Schumacher visits today's lost adolescents in "Twelve."

Don't expect much debating. Based on Nick McDonell's 2002 novel, "Twelve" peddles the same dissipated rich-kid fantasies that Brett Easton Ellis popularized with "Less Than Zero" back in the '80s. If you're still shocked to hear that the offspring of wealthy Manhattanites are snorting and sleeping their way toward Harvard, "Twelve" will leave you breathless. (The rest of us will be in stitches.)

Chace Crawford, a veteran of this genre from television's "Gossip Girl," plays White Mike, a potential Ivy Leaguer who instead becomes a pusher to his posh friends. The reason: He's still grieving over his mother's death from cancer. (Clearly, someone has read Jay McInerney's 1984 novel, "Bright Lights, Big City." Or maybe nobody read it at all.)

"Twelve" doesn't have an original thought in its head: There's a pure-hearted Phoebe Caulfield type (Emma Roberts) and a ghetto thug played by - you'll never guess - Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson. Meanwhile, the kids are huffing an addictive super drug called twelve that combines the best of coke, ecstasy and heroin.

It all sounds like an apocryphal horror story your mom heard somewhere, and even she wouldn't believe it. But Kiefer Sutherland's hard-boiled narration ("It is Saturday night and the city is bright and loud") proves the filmmakers are dead serious. "Twelve" is the most gullible and disingenuous youth movie since, well, "St. Elmo's Fire."