18 Reasons The Parent Trap Is Actually Really Messed Up

Who in their right mind believes that it's okay to split up a pair of twins before they're even born? Especially when both families involved are exorbitantly wealthy? This isn't a Lifetime movie where someone gives birth in a crack den and has to choose between a twin and a sweet sweet crack rock; this is a Disney movie.

How hard would it have been to work out an agreement that would allow the two girls to grow up together? Not only is their current arrangement Draconian, but it's also definitely going to instill a lifelong distrust of their parents. 

If you grew up in the '90s, then you might remember a slew of hazing deaths that began to be more widely reported than they had been in the past. With that in mind, why in the world would Nancy Meyers and the rest of the screenwriting team think it was okay to make a film where an 11-year-old girl, after losing a high stakes poker game, is made to jump into a lake naked while the rest of the girls steal her clothes?

This hazing ritual is mostly harmless, but it normalizes this kind of behavior and tells its audience of young women that it's okay to put other people through the ringer without worrying about the repercussions of their actions. Yikes!

Even though these child millionaires have had a truly strange upbringing, for whatever reason, no one seems to care about what they do on a day-to-day basis. Whether they're at camp - where there seems to be no more than two counselors - or in London, where an 11-year-old girl can just run out of her posh home, down the street, and into a phone booth where she can make a collect call to America, there's no one around to tell these girls no.

In fact, there's so little oversight in their lives that they're able to SWAP LIVES without anyone noticing until the girls get bored of their ruse and give themselves up. 

There's no doubt that both girls have been given a raw deal in their parent's divorce. But Annie, who was sent to London to live with her mother, was sold a bag of BS from day one. Not only was she raised to believe that she was a proper English lass, but she's also been denied the freedom that a dual citizenship can bestow on someone.

Yes, she can travel internationally for camp, but by raising her as someone she's not, her entire sense of self gets fractured when she finds out the truth. If she doesn't end up in a mental institution by the time she's 15, it'll be a miracle. 

Who in Annie's family thought it would be a good idea to send an 11-year-old girl into a shark tank of pre-teens in a limo? It doesn't matter how good the camp is, that kind of introduction is a set-up on a Machiavellian scale. Either her mother (who presumably makes these kids of decisions) is so out of touch with normal society that she doesn't realize how much she's separating Annie from the rest of the campers (who showed up on a school bus for f*ck's sake), or she wants her daughter to be systematically broken down by girls of a lower class who have no other retribution against their sorry lot in life than to take Annie, the rich girl, down a peg. 

There may only be two counselors at the camp where Annie and Hallie meet, so it makes sense that the two exhausted women who have to deal with a bunch of children are fine with letting a gambling ring slip through the cracks. In a way, it helps bolster the camp's economy, and no one's really getting hurt - except for the children who are learning how to be rewarded for gambling with money they don't have. If you like gambling, that's fine.

But you're probably not an 11-year-old girl who doesn't actually have any personal capital or really anything of your own to speak of. These girls are betting hundreds(!) of dollars on a clandestine poker game with other 11 year olds. If they haven't bankrupted their family by the time they're in their early 20s, it's going to be a miracle.