Based on my wife's recollection (I'd never seen this movie until very recently) this movie was huge back when it first came out. I'm struggling to understand why. As with so many other things, did we just not... have taste or know how to distinguish good from terrible in the 90's?

I feel this this comment/review has gotten ahead of itself already, but man this holds up terribly. Though I'm pretty sure it was terrible in 1997 too, so I'm not sure "holds up" is the right term.

I have no idea how Freddie Prince Jr and Ryan Phillippe ever got an acting gig, let alone multiple ones. I've seen more convincing performances in middle school musicals. On the upside, Sarah Michelle Gellar (yay Buffy!) and Jennifer Love Hewitt (of many things) do the best with the material they are given and while even they can't manage to save a script this awful, they can at least make watching it halfway bearable.

The plot machinations are so insane, and make so little sense, that I don't even think it's worth going into them. Don't @ me (or fine, why not, maybe do) if you want me to go into detail. The script for this movie must've looked like a block of swiss cheese.

Overall: I don't know if tastes have shifted, I don't know if we were all dumber in the 90s, I don't know if we are spoiled by the quality of current movies and TV (especially in the horror genre, which all of a sudden is amazing again), but the TL;DR is: there are literally thousands of movies better than this one. Watch one of those.