Written by Mark Hyman and Joe Zack
Directed by Brian Robbins

CAST:
Chris Evans Kyle
Kyle Labine Dave
Bryan Greenberg Matty
Scarlett Johansson Francesca
Erika Christensen Anna
Darius Miles Desmond Rhodes
Leonardo Nam Roy
Tyra Ferrell Desmond’s mother
Matthew Lillard Bill MacKenzie

When I first heard The Perfect Score was a teen comedy featuring Matthew Lillard about an attempt to steal an SAT test, I figured I was in for another stupid teen comedy, probably with heaps of humor centering on bodily fluids.

I was dead wrong, and pleasantly surprised.

The Perfect Score is not a typical dumb teen comedy. In fact, as a comedy, it’s quite restrained, and actually pretty serious. There are shades of The Breakfast Club here, and probably not unintentionally (Francesca even asks during a group scene if they’re all going to get stoned and confess their deepest secrets like the characters in that film did).

The Perfect Score is a catharsis of teen angst and cynicism, in which in which six high schoolers (not seven, as reported in imdb’s plot outline) vent their frustration with what they perceive as the injustices of the SAT system, which they view as an oppressive system that reduces all students to a number, favors some demographic groups over others, encourages schools and teachers to inflate scores, and ignores the individual talents and strengths of different students by forcing them to take a standardized test. They decide infiltrate the headquarters of a testing company to steal the test, which they feel is perfectly justified. Whether any of this is something you agree with isn’t as important as the fact that unlike so many other teen-oriented movies, this one has an actual point of view.

The movie sides with its teen leads, and empathizes with their anger, but not at the expense of necessarily endorsing their criminal plan, and without ignoring the fact that teens are not only diverse from one another, but possessed of depth and gifts that we may not notice upon first glance. We think we know who Roy and Desmond are when we first meet them, for example, but are surprised to learn that they’re much more. The characters start off as stereotypes, (the salutatorian, the bad girl, the jock, the stoner, etc.) but are given greater depth as the movie progresses, and it’s darn refreshing every time it happens.

The movie gets points because it takes seriously the pressures that high schoolers feel in taking the SAT’s, in trying to win basketball scholarships, and trying to maintain long-distance relationships with loved ones that have gone off to college, but doesn’t make believe that the kids are necessarily right in everything they do and say. The kids screw up. They get into trouble. The SAT heist doesn’t go smoothy. And they don’t always get along with each other. (They don’t, for example, hang out together from the start because they’re all friends, but like those kids in The Breakfast Club, are thrown together in part out of mutual need, and partly out of happenstance.) It doesn’t depict all the parents as uncaring, out-of-touch trolls, and the kids as heroes who know everything. While two of the prominently seen parents don’t get any awards for being close to their kids, Tyra Ferrell in particular (from Boyz in the Hood and Poetic Justice) shines as Desmond Rhodes’ tough but caring mother, who not only makes sure to keep Desmond on the right path, but even shows concern for the other kids.

The dialogue is well-written, the character arcs are satisfying, and the humor is enjoyable without being contrived or forced. Roy (Leonardo Nam) in particular is the breakout comedic character in the film whose stoner antics get genuine laughs without resorting to gross-out gags involving semen or fecal matter.

It’s not the deepest or most original movie, but I really enjoyed it, and plan to see it again.