Released: January 30th, 2004
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Brian Greenberg, Erika Christensen, Darius Miles, Matthew Lillard
Writer/Director: Mark Schwahn, Mark Hyman and Jon Zack/ Brian Robbins
Description: Six high school seniors decide to break into the Princeton Testing Center so they can steal the answers to their upcoming SAT tests and all get perfect scores.
[Review may contain spoilers. Please watch movie before reading, unless you don't care. Most of these films have already been released for a while, so they should be readily available.]
***
Whenever a high school movie picks a particular moment in high school, they tend to blow it out of proportion. There's sports, prom, cheerleading, or graduation, and each have end of the world implications. The writers tend to over-dramatize the situations, so that the teen audience continues to believe their lives are more important than they are normally.
"The Perfect Score" takes on a subject that may actually be important to their lives: the S.A.T. Test. It's plot is definitely something we all thought about during this stressful time, and something that a lot of us dismissed immediately . Stealing the answers to the test is ridiculous and something that only should be in movies. It's a great idea on the surface, a heist movie with high school kids, but something went wrong with the execution.
Everyone's motivation was as stereotypical as you would imagine, but there didn't even seem to be a hint of subtext to their reasons. Desmond (Miles) needed them to play college basketball, Anna (Christensen) wanted to fulfil her parents wishes, Kyle (Evans) wanted to pursue his dreams, Matty (Greenberg) want to reunited with his girlfriend, and Francesca (Johansson) and Roy (Leonardo Nam) didn't disclose their need for the answers. Those descriptions were as deep as they went with it, and the coming of age ending where they all decide that the test didn't hold power over them, was really contrived. By having them do the right thing and not use the answer was the one right thing the writers did with the script.
There's always a reason why a film has three people credited as writing the screenplay. Usually it means the original draft was not up to par, or that someone came up with the story but wasn't a good enough writer to turn in a shootable draft.
Of the three writers, I'm only familiar with Mark Schwahn, who is the creator of "One Tree Hill" and writer of "Coach Carter". There are times in the film where I see some of the comedy that is prevalent in his previous work, but there are also moments and characters that are the complete opposite, that I have to believe he was the late comer to the draft, or that he was rewritten by the other two who had created the story. I don't see how Roy's character was nothing more than we need a funny Asian kid because you know Asians are good with computers, but we'll give him the added wrinkle that he smoke weed.
The performances were nothing to write home about either, Johansson and Greenberg steal the movie among the six leads, while Darius Miles couldn't even play himself well. Evans was flat as usual, which is something that seemed to plague him early on in his career. He didn't really start coming into his own until he became more of a dramadey/action actor. Lillard's in four scenes and he steals them all, which is nothing new for him. You could tell that a lot of the actors we still learning the craft (except for Miles), and were very inconsistent. It was also refreshing to see Johansson play a character that shows off her acting rather than her sex appeal.
"The Perfect Score" is one of those movie that tried to cash in with the teen demographic, which wasn't all that unusual for films produced by MTV. Although, they tended to be a little more "edgy" than their Disney counterpart, they still were too squeaky clean to have any relevance in the genre. There's a reason short lived shows like "My So-Called Life" and "Freaks and Geeks", and the John Hughes movies from the 80s, still resonate today: they didn't sanitize their plots because they thought the audience couldn't handle it. It's a shame that more filmmaker don't trust the intelligence level of teenagers.
Rating: 5/10 -- It's a watchable movie with some famous faces in it, but I'd recommend checking out their better films first. Especially, Erika Christensen in "Swim Fan", it's a much better guilty pleasure. If you're a fan of the genre, you'll enjoy it, but if you think it's an updated "Breakfast Club", well, please watch "The Breakfast Club" again.
"The Perfect Score" takes on a subject that may actually be important to their lives: the S.A.T. Test. It's plot is definitely something we all thought about during this stressful time, and something that a lot of us dismissed immediately . Stealing the answers to the test is ridiculous and something that only should be in movies. It's a great idea on the surface, a heist movie with high school kids, but something went wrong with the execution.
Everyone's motivation was as stereotypical as you would imagine, but there didn't even seem to be a hint of subtext to their reasons. Desmond (Miles) needed them to play college basketball, Anna (Christensen) wanted to fulfil her parents wishes, Kyle (Evans) wanted to pursue his dreams, Matty (Greenberg) want to reunited with his girlfriend, and Francesca (Johansson) and Roy (Leonardo Nam) didn't disclose their need for the answers. Those descriptions were as deep as they went with it, and the coming of age ending where they all decide that the test didn't hold power over them, was really contrived. By having them do the right thing and not use the answer was the one right thing the writers did with the script.
There's always a reason why a film has three people credited as writing the screenplay. Usually it means the original draft was not up to par, or that someone came up with the story but wasn't a good enough writer to turn in a shootable draft.
Of the three writers, I'm only familiar with Mark Schwahn, who is the creator of "One Tree Hill" and writer of "Coach Carter". There are times in the film where I see some of the comedy that is prevalent in his previous work, but there are also moments and characters that are the complete opposite, that I have to believe he was the late comer to the draft, or that he was rewritten by the other two who had created the story. I don't see how Roy's character was nothing more than we need a funny Asian kid because you know Asians are good with computers, but we'll give him the added wrinkle that he smoke weed.
The performances were nothing to write home about either, Johansson and Greenberg steal the movie among the six leads, while Darius Miles couldn't even play himself well. Evans was flat as usual, which is something that seemed to plague him early on in his career. He didn't really start coming into his own until he became more of a dramadey/action actor. Lillard's in four scenes and he steals them all, which is nothing new for him. You could tell that a lot of the actors we still learning the craft (except for Miles), and were very inconsistent. It was also refreshing to see Johansson play a character that shows off her acting rather than her sex appeal.
"The Perfect Score" is one of those movie that tried to cash in with the teen demographic, which wasn't all that unusual for films produced by MTV. Although, they tended to be a little more "edgy" than their Disney counterpart, they still were too squeaky clean to have any relevance in the genre. There's a reason short lived shows like "My So-Called Life" and "Freaks and Geeks", and the John Hughes movies from the 80s, still resonate today: they didn't sanitize their plots because they thought the audience couldn't handle it. It's a shame that more filmmaker don't trust the intelligence level of teenagers.
Rating: 5/10 -- It's a watchable movie with some famous faces in it, but I'd recommend checking out their better films first. Especially, Erika Christensen in "Swim Fan", it's a much better guilty pleasure. If you're a fan of the genre, you'll enjoy it, but if you think it's an updated "Breakfast Club", well, please watch "The Breakfast Club" again.
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