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When you’re competing for a spot in the country’s top schools with the children of the rich, powerful, and well-connected, the pressure can be great. And in Bad Genius, a gifted teen decides that she’s willing to risk everything for the chance to follow her dreams.
Bad Genius follows a poor girl’s desperate attempts to make her big dreams come true. When Lynn (Callina Liang) is offered a scholarship to Exton Pacific—an esteemed prep school in Seattle—she hopes that it will be her ticket to Juilliard. Lynn’s attempt to help a friend leads her to set up a lucrative cheating ring that threatens her future in New York. But when a classmate comes to her with an opportunity to fund her education and also help support her struggling single dad (Benedict Wong), she can’t turn it down.
With a whole lot of money within reach—enough to help fund her Juilliard education—Lynn sets out to find a way to work around the tight security of the SATs to help her classmates beat the system. The film has a lot to say about wealth and privilege, showing how much harder it can be for lower-income students of color to succeed. As one of the few non-white kids in her school, Lynn is often called the “face of the school”—yet she knows that her scholarship comes with high expectations. The classes may come easy to her, but she still has to juggle her school work with extra-curricular activities, the long commute, and the hours spent working in her father’s laundromat—all while her classmates lounge by their pool.
Though the story takes a while to build—working through Lynn’s first cheating ring before setting up the Big Heist—it eventually does build to something tense and suspenseful. Lynn’s plan is pretty ingenious, but it requires a whole lot of planning—and some help from the school’s other brilliant scholarship kid. There are so many moving parts—so many pieces that have to come together just perfectly to make it all work. And while it doesn’t necessarily make for an outstanding thriller, it’s still an entertaining one.
With its story of a bright and industrious scholarship kid who breaks the rules to try to get ahead, Bad Genius follows a likeable young character through an incredibly high-pressure situation. And though Lynn makes a whole lot of bad choices along the way, you’ll still root for her to come out on top in the end.
You can join Lynn on her mission when Bad Genius arrives in theaters on October 11, 2024.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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