Review By Justin Skinner

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Remember The Breakfast Club?

A good old-fashioned coming-of-age/learning-lessons/bonding flick?

Now, imagine how much better that movie would have been if, instead of all having to spend a day in detention together, the characters were brought together because they were all incredibly, incredibly stupid.

That's right; it would be negative a billion times better! And now there's proof, thanks to MTV Pictures' latest magnum opus, The Perfect Score.

The Perfect Score lumps six dimwits together as they try to achieve respectability by doing at least passably well on a test that measures basic reading and mathematical skills. By "passably well", of course, I mean "well enough to prove to those evaluating test scores that they can at least be characterized as homo erectus, with homo sapien being a nice bonus."

And, in true teen movie ensemble cast fashion, the students all come from various walks of life. There are, in no specific order:

• The bland, generic good guy who maybe just had a bad day the first time he did the test. You know, maybe he left his thinkin' brain in his other jeans and found out — too late! — that he just had his place-holder brain with him. You know, the plastic one you put in your head so your skull doesn't cave in when your thinkin' brain's being washed.



• The equally generic good guy's buddy, whose main job is to provide exposition and move the plot along: "Okay, guys, enough comic relief and engaging story lines! I just wanted to remind you all that if we don't get this turtle back in the dean's office by midnight, we'll all be suspended!" Luckily, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of engaging story lines or comic relief in this film, so our buddy character can basically be expository at will. People may even cheer him on, pleading for less time to be wasted on banal, drippy dialogue in the hopes that the movie ends as mercifully quickly as humanly possible.



• The mandatory misunderstood bad girl, played by Scarlett Johansson. While her very presence in The Perfect Score may raise some eyebrows, I feel it would be remiss to ask what this former indie darling could possibly be doing in this enormous pregnant teen-sized mistake of a movie. It's truly a canny career move for an actress who was dangerously close to being typecast as "that smart, talented actress who generally appears in good movies." Something needed to be done to correct that.



• The sort of pudgy-cute Julia Stiles-y character or reasonable facsimile thereof, who must appear in every poor teen movie. Her character is the "good girl", explaining at one point that she's "never missed curfew, never cut class." That being the case, sweet Jesus! What does she do in her room alone every night that allowed her to do this poorly at the SAT? Clearly she hasn't been studying, or even reading. Unless her alone-time hobbies include drilling holes in her head and pouring Liquid Plum-R inside, her failure to do well at the SAT seems to be evidence that all the perfect attendance records in the world aren't going to help you if your mother smoked crack while birthing you halfway down a five-storey flight of steps she was falling down at the time.
  
  
• The token black guy. He's a basketball star, natch, so he only needs to score a 900 on the SAT. On a test where scores range from 400 to 1,600. So, he has to get slightly better than double the score he would get just for showing up and breathing for three hours. I'm not sure, but I think you get an 850 for just being able to spell SAT. Oh, sure there are a few things that are easier than scoring 900 on the test. For instance, it's probably easier to eat a delicious piece of cake without accidentally swallowing your own head; It's even marginally easier to take a bath and remember not to wash your hair with bees.



• The stereotypical Asian stoner. You know, THAT guy. We've all seen him. The Asian guy who's stoned all the time? No? Nobody? Well, for the record, the Asian stoner in the film probably hasn't ever seen an Asian guy —or anyone, for that matter — stoned, either. His stoner portrayal is somehow over-the-top without being remotely interesting. He seems to just sort of meld into the background, clutching his diploma from the Bill S. Preston, Esq. School of Acting, making everyone wince every time he grunts out a line in the manner of any not-very-funny person who doesn't know the first thing about being stoned.

With this cast of characters, it's hard not to immediately want to walk out of the theater, directly into the path of a truck. But there we are. These are the people we're being asked to spend the next hour and a half with.

Now, faced with the daunting task of proving that they're not the stupidest stupids to ever stupid, the characters decide they have no recourse but to steal the SAT answers. Already, their resourceful brilliance is evident. Why waste time studying when you can lead a group of borderline retards with poor verbal and mathematical skills on a complicated heist? Surely nothing can go wrong here! Sign me up, old bean! I'll be the one wearing a big "We're Committing a Crime! Arrest Us" sign to save time.

Do they succeed? Who honestly cares? Director Brian Robbins (a 40-year-old man whose greatest achievement is directing Varsity Blues, an achievement I'd rank slightly below mine, for not directing it) doesn't, as he lets the trailer quickly devolve into a mishmash of romantic subplots, whiny sentimentality and —unbelievably — a Matrix rip-off (welcome back to the year 2000, when that was only just barely starting to be a tired cliché in crappy comedies!).

There are also the requisite maudlin discussions on dreams and the future. "No matter what happens, when you get out of that room you're still gonna be you, man," opines our expository buddy character at one point. "No test is gonna change that." The underlying message being that no matter how hard these characters have worked together, they're all still totally idiotic failures.

So, too, is this trailer.

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