The Perfect Score (2004)

Maybe the writer of this movie, sat to watch John Hughes's The Breakfast Club (1985), many times, thought about its own leads; these high school different students, whom pour their hearts out to each other, and discover how they have a lot more in common than they imagined, then wrote about the idea of them meeting in a night robbery, instead of a morning detention. Or that what eventually seemed !The premise is fine. A heist comedy with heart; where there are 1) Thrill. 2) Comedy. 3) Some drama. I loved points in the script; from situations like when the brainy girl had to get into the already being stolen building; for the heck of it, to touches like the double meaning in the title. The cast is very good. Scarlett Johansson is sexy and talented. Erika Christensen is yet more sexy. Enough to mention that while her running scene, my heart was beating like crazy ! Leonardo Nam is great as the funny stoner, being the biggest comedy this movie has. Even real-life school basketball star Darius Miles manages to do his job so convincingly. Only Chris Evans and Bryan Greenberg aren't charismatic enough. But anyway, Erika Christensen is sexy ! The direction made things hot and snappy; it mastered the thrill of the heist, and some of the visual comedy (as in the team's daydreams), while leading the emotional parts rightly too.Now to The Perfect Score's not perfect score; and I mean one factor : the script. Well, to sum it all up, while the heist and the comedy parts were OK, the drama part wasn't. The characters weren't built seriously. Take for instance the stoner; why he's living this way ? All what we know about him is that his mother is dead, and that's not enough at all. Moreover, the scene of him with the basketball star's mom; what was that about ? After one tongue-lashing, he quits drugs and refuses cheating !! Which leads us to the ending. Not choosing using the answers which they hardly got isn't the problem, not playing it logically is. I mean, com'on, suddenly we discover that ALL the leads are geniuses ! And the way they realized that "they don't need cheating to get what they want" wasn't any well written. At that part, I felt the writer wanted to persuade us verbally not actually. And finally, what was the story of that so serious, yet half naked, woman in the ETS building ?! According to its premise, this is light comedy. And according to its fault, it is so light ! That's why it's entertaining, but not that memorably effective. However, among the heist movies of 2004, like Ocean's Twelve, Times Lucky, The Big Bounce, and The Ladykillers, it has its high rank, being way better than most of them, let alone that Erika Christensen is sexy !

Six anxiety ridden teens, Chris Evans, Erika Christenson, Leonardo Nam, Darius Miles, Scarlett Johanssen and Bryan Greenburg are having panic attacks over the impending Scholastic Aptitude Tests aka the infamous SAT which will determine whether you go to an Ivy League School or MacDonald clown college. Don't tell them anything different.What to do but hatch a plan to steal the answers and get The Perfect Score which will put you on the path to fame, glory, and riches, whatever priority you have.The Perfect Score is a new millennial version of The Breakfast Club and it even has the same number of troubled youth who spent that afternoon in detention discovering themselves. It's not as serious ultimately as The Breakfast Club was, but at least this one included a black and Asian teen in the mix.Although Chris Evans and Scarlett Johanssen have gone on to have the most substantive careers at this point, the best in the film hands down is Leonardo Nam. He's the perpetually stoned one who is the most underachieving in the class, but he turns out to be the one who makes lemonade with lemons life hands him. Nam is also interesting in that he's the one who seems to be rebelling against an Asian stereotype in that those young people are the smart overachievers. In any event he steals every scene he's in.The Perfect Score is a nice teen comedy about six unlikely people who bond together in an objective and develop relationships and aspects of their character they never thought to have possessed.

I did well on the SATs, but I do not consider them fair. The first part of this film does a good job describing the problems with the SATs -- and with high-stakes tests in general. I am a college professor who sees standardized testing as very problematic; this film does a great public service by challenging the prevailing wisdom on testing.The film seems to begin as a protest movie, with the students motivated by their righteous indignation to undermine the SAT. Once they get organized, though, they seem to forget this motivation, and this devolves into a fairly mediocre -- if diverting -- teen/adventure flick.I would like to see the first 30 minutes remade as a documentary; I would show it to my students and colleagues. Fairtest.org is a good place to learn more about the corrosive effect of these tests, by the way.

Six students plan a heist operation to steal the answers of their upcoming SAT... the plot is simple and definitely not that original. The characters are quite stereotypical, they speak predicted dialogues and their actions don't prove any innovation of the screenwriters. Still, this movie produced by MTV doesn't appear as boring, irritating or silly. On the other hand it has some occasional funny moments like Francesca as Trinity in her daydream etc.The cast is actually the main reason I watched this film. Scarlett Johansson looks great and pulls off a nice professional performance. Erika Christensen and Chris Evans are also there but I didn't recognize the other guys. The bottomline is that I didn't really think this movie is bad at all... it's a fine one to watch in a relaxed mood.