Release Date: January 30, 2004
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Erika Christensen, Chris Evans, Bryan Greenberg, Darius Miles, Leonardo Nam
Directed by: Brian Robbins
Written by: Mark Schwahn, Marc Hyman, Jon Zack
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (language, sexual content, some drug references)
In 2001, Nicole Kidman turned critical heads with a pair of remarkable performances in the musical Moulin Rouge and the thriller The Others, whereupon Miramax Films quietly released Birthday Girl, a molding project starring Kidman that had long been in the can but would only then be best suited to take advantage of the actress’s surging popularity. Kidman has nothing to do with The Perfect Score, but I mention her because this movie appears to be a kind of Birthday Girl for Scarlett Johansson. Johansson caught filmgoers’ eyes in a pair of 2003 releases, Lost in Translation and (for those lucky enough to see it) Girl With a Pearl Earring, and following those critical heights it is strange to see her in a bourgeois teen comedy like this. But The Perfect Score has long been in the can at Paramount Pictures, and it is no surprise that with Johansson as the de facto “it” girl of 2003, the studio would choose this film as their leadoff hitter for 2004.
Johansson is almost unrecognizable in The Perfect Score, dressed, as she is, in fishnet stockings, and her fingernails indelibly covered in Wite-Out, but she still stands apart from her costars because she has a little something called talent. For the purposes of this discussion, talent is the leap of imagination an actor must (and one Johansson does) make in fleshing out a character, even one as sorrowfully underwritten as Francesca, the rich girl-turned-rebel she plays in this movie.
Francesca, unfortunately, is not the main character. That designation belongs to Kyle (Chris Evans), and, to a degree, Kyle’s best friend Matty (Bryan Greenberg), a pair of high school seniors in Princeton, New Jersey, who are about to take the SAT. The SAT, for those who’ve been living under a rock since June 1926, when the test was first administered, is that life-defining standardized exam that scores college-bound high schoolers on a scale from 200 to 1,600 and is the most widely used barometer by college admissions offices.
Both Kyle and Matty need desperately higher scores than they can realistically achieve to get into the schools of their choice (Kyle wants into Cornell for architecture, and Matty wants to hook up with his girlfriend at Maryland), so they concoct a scheme to sneak into the regional offices of the Educational Testing Service -- the bureau that administers the SAT -- and steal the answers, seeking out Francesca along the way because her father owns the building where ETS is located.
That the plan even comes to fruition is the movie’s first major stroke of pure convenience; that Kyle and Matty would know someone like Francesca, who knows the way into ETS, is another, and from there the events in the movie are like a line of falling dominoes, continuing without regard for anything else in the real world. This is part heist movie, lending a nice double egde to the title, and part teen fantasy. Soon the threesome has expanded to include Anna (Erika Christensen, who might’ve once been the headliner here, but it’s obvious she can’t hold a candle to Johansson), their high school’s No. 2 student, who blanked on her last go at the SAT; Desmond (Darius Miles), a national prep basketball star who needs a 900 to get into St. John’s University; and Roy (Leonardo Nam), a stoner who happens to be in the right place at the right time.
Except for Nam, who hams up the stoner Roy with such relish that it’s impossible not to like him, none of these actors or characters make an impact. At any rate, for most of the film they’re struggling to get out from underneath the invisible weight of the teen movie genre -- especially the two leads, played by Evans and Greenberg. They are your typical good-looking WB hacks, the kind of actors who only pass for actors with viewers whose critical gauges are calibrated to standards like afterschool TV (the movie even takes a cheap shot at itself here, referring to the pair as Dawson and Pacey) and films like Not Another Teen Movie (which Evans had a part in).
The diversity of the cast -- everyone from a rebel rich girl to a basketball star to a stoner to an academic queen to the everyman leads -- suggests that John Hughes-directed teen classic of 1985, The Breakfast Club, and indeed the plot, which has our heroes bridging their differences with decreasing reluctance, plays out like an unlikely farce of something Hughes would’ve come up with 20 years ago. But The Breakfast Club had two things going for it: first, it was original, and second, it was made in the 1980’s, when things like rationale and cinematic standards were in short supply. The Perfect Score, on the other hand, can spice up the mix with a spoof of The Matrix and some kinetic editing, but it can’t get around its genre’s enormously dubious legacy.
The Perfect Score is directed by Brian Robbins, who has made something of a career for himself recycling tired teen movie plots into respectably irreverent comedies (see also Varsity Blues and Ready to Rumble), and this movie, which has its moments but fails to impress overall, is generally indicative of the results. Robbins can push opposites of very different breeds together and make them fall in love (like Francesca and Matty, who seem dead set against each other from the start but, surprise, surprise, discover they have a thing for each other when she bails him out of jail in the final act) but all of the directorial experience in the world can’t make up for a trashy story. I didn’t mind, though. I was more enamored with the constantly changing Scarlett Johansson, who has taken even a doomed-from-the-start movie like The Perfect Score and turned it into a coming attraction for whatever she does next. If she can make Francesca work here, what can’t she do?
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)