By Jake Wilson
BAD GENIUS
★★½
MA, 97 minutes, in cinemas
Educators in the US and elsewhere may not be thrilled by the release of J.C. Lee’s Bad Genius – an American remake of a 2017 Thai film of the same name, which like its predecessor walks us through a series of increasingly elaborate methods of cheating on exams, at least some of which might well be effective in the real world.
Callina Liang plays a brainy high-schooler in Bad Genius.Credit: Roadshow
The first and most basic of these involves brainy high-schooler Lynn (Callina Liang) inscribing the answers on a pencil eraser and dropping it into a shoe, which she kicks across the aisle so it arrives under the desk of the friend she’s agreed to aid, while the teacher at the front of the room is conveniently nodding off.
All this is edited in the manner of a heist sequence, with suspense escalating until the last moment. But the real payoff is Lynn’s gratified smirk when she thinks she’s got away with it – which conveys not just relief, but a sense that she’s seized a chance to have some of the fun she’s been missing out on as an obedient straight-A student.
Sadly, Bad Genius fails to fulfil its early promise, especially when it comes to subverting the English-language stereotype of Asian students as brainy but straitlaced. Lynn remains a straightforwardly sympathetic underdog, compared with the lazy, wealthy white students who surround her at the private school where she’s won a deserved scholarship.
Her official motive for her misdeeds could hardly be less interesting: after graduating, she wants to go to Juilliard and study piano, against the wishes of her beloved dad (Benedict Wong), who runs a laundromat and dotes on her in turn.
A TV writer making his feature directing debut, Lee is not on this showing a very distinctive filmmaker, beyond his penchant for the kind of symmetrical framing that has become a familiar shortcut to style.
The film’s suspense setpieces are effective, but I suspect this is mostly thanks to his experienced crew, led by cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz, whose credits range from the Safdie brothers to Stranger Things.
Liang, who recently made a strong impression in Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, would be great in silent movies: her character is reserved by nature and has plenty to hide, yet her performance constantly lets us in on what she’s thinking, making every eye flicker count.
Her warm rapport with Wong is also immediately convincing. Some of the more melodramatic dialogue scenes are less successful, for her and the rest of the cast – but then, there’s only so much anyone can do with lines such as “We all have to live with the choices we make”.
It’s too bad that Lee and his co-writer Julius Onah (Captain America: Brave New World) aren’t willing to let Lynn get more of a kick of breaking the rules. For that matter, they seem reluctant to allow her a libido of any sort, whatever we make of the awkward scene where she and her partner in crime, Bank (Jabari Banks), confide in one another while sitting in a bathtub fully dressed.
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