BAD GENIUS– 4 STARS

Derived directly from the gambling term, the topmost social commentary terrain of Bad Genius is the “high-stakes testing” which has infiltrated nearly every level of the United States education system, including, at the very top, the norm-referenced SAT college admissions test taken by an average of two million students a year. When 96% of the $700 million standardized test market is controlled by four publishing or scoring companies, any noble intentions for honest and helpful data for students and educators are often lost to lucrative business interests. If you think nine figures is a big number, try eleven. The test prep industry to prepare students for those monstrous exams is valued at nearly $50 billion, a figure higher than the GDP of half the countries in world. 

Talk about throwing money at a problem. Alas, there’s a level of Bad Genius that takes a page from All the President’s Men to “follow the money.” Let’s do the same for a moment. Specific SAT prep courses–all to take a $68 dollar test–can cost anywhere from a $50 self-guided book to thousands of dollars of in-person courses or one-on-one tutoring. Considering the high bars of admittance scores to get into the top colleges, a few points here or there can sway hundreds or thousands of dollars and break a family’s back trying to earn scholarship assistance for skyrocketing tuition costs.

LESSON #1: WHAT’S IT WORTH TO YOU?-- Those make-or-break implications call to mind the question of this lesson. How much money is one willing to throw at this problem to improve their standing and extend their ladder of higher education towards a perceived greater success in life? How many of the troubling consquences of the high-stakes testing gauntlet does one weigh right alongside the financial hits? Maybe and most curiously, if you can’t afford the price or handle the woes, what corners are you willing to cut? If any of these thoughts stress you out right now, imagine being a teenager trying to shoulder them. Now you’ve found the mindset of Bad Genius, an American remake of a celebrated 2017 Thai film of the same name.

The main protagonist of the movie is the disciplined introvert Mei Ling, who goes by the more American-friendly name of Lynn Kang. Played as a brilliant high schooler by Tell Me Everything’s Callina Liang in a driven performance, Lynn has gotten farther than her over-proud, lowly laundromat owner father (the cast’s biggest name of Benedict Wong from the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and deceased mother could have every dreamed of. Her impressive aptitude and–more blatantly–her demographic box-checking status as an Asian score her a full-ride to the fictitious and prestigious Exton Pacific School in the Seattle area. There, she befriends Bank (a very compelling Bel-Air star Jabari Banks), a fellow token minority savant, and orbits a bevy of rich white kids on fast tracks to college.

One of those privileged and popular teens, Grace (Taylor Hickson of Freeform’s Motherland: Fort Salem), strikes up a positive friendship with Lynn. Sure enough, a semi-cliched by-product of being so financially comfortable is that students like Grace, her boyfriend Pat (Samuel Braun of The Hallmark Channel’s The Way Home), and several others slack on their academics and sink precariously close to flunking out of Exton, which would upset the apple carts of high parental expectations at their mansion homes.

LESSON #2: WHO WOULD HELP A FRIEND CHEAT AND WHY– On one particular widowmaker exam, Grace is unprepared and drowning to the point where the straight arrow Lynn pities her and reluctantly passes her friend a slew of answers to get by. Like any little white lie or victimless crime, once it happens once, it’s easier to execute again, especially if it keeps a wallflower like Lynn in good standing with the only crowd that’s ever given her attention. Besides, Exton and its flatterer headmaster (Sarah-Jane Redmond of Millenium) would never suspect their multicultural poster child becoming the ringleader of a cheating ring.

LESSOn #2: USE WHAT YOUR GOOD AT TO GET WHAT YOU NEED– Soon enough, Pat turns this into a business proposition for Lynn. She devises a technique of coded finger signals matching piano chord combinations. For Lynn, this is using what she’s good at to get what she needs, which is financial relief for her father at home and squirreling away money to make the big move to New York City for college. The big white whale score on the horizon is the vaunted SAT, billed in Bad Genius as the most secure test in the world. That scheme requires a far more elaborate plan and thicker bundles of cash for Lynn.

Risks in Bad Genius are sized-up constantly by the instantaneous computational internal monologue spoken in Lynn’s head through Liang’s narration. The peril of this peer group’s rule-breaking racket plays out very much like an edge-of-your seat heist movie. Intimidating camera placements controlled by cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz (The Black Phone, Ready or Not) create the foundation of excellent tension. The villain, so to speak, our on-screen youths are staring down is not an authority figure adult, but the big bad test itself. Jutkiewicz’s shots are put into a kinetic vice of editing by fellow thriller specialist Franklin Peterson (Fair Play) with a steady, unnerving musical score from the Navalny pair of Marius De Vries and Matt Robertson. 

All of these traits of Bad Genius’s aesthetic jolts the audience’s blood pressure while being locked, more often than not, into generic classroom seats made all the more confining by the threats at hand. Matching the heist subgenre, it’s only a matter of time before all the money gets noticed and someone squeals, turns on a friend, feels guilty, or gets caught entirely. What pushes back against those typical pitfall tropes is the spine of youthful righteousness crafted by the Luce creative team of director J.C. Lee and co-writer Julius Onah. This is their second outstanding and frighteningly intense teen-scene banger in a row. 

LESSON #3: EMPOWERING YOUR OWN FUTURE BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY– Despite so many settings demanding quiet for test-taking, Bad Genius still chooses stumps with plenty of anti-establishment aims to shout about. As Lynn and her classmates come to see it, their attitude is to determine their own futures themselves, especially with the rank socioeconomic and ethnic divisions present between the mix of united people. They don’t want a test to outweigh their own merits and perceived hard work. In their eyes, they deserve the competitive advantages they are bending the rules to seize, and that’s a tantalizing tightrope to watch being walked in this movie.