Synopsis: Students in an entrepreneurial high school unite to fight for the injustices in the college admission process.
Now the question of the question “What makes a good girl go bad?” It is a cliche. However, J.C. Lee while luring you into reading his heist film on teenage cheating which got turned into a scandal about a ‘7’ rated Thai movie of 2017 remade by Nattawut Poonpiriya, gives a slightly different response. But what will even the brightest of students like Lynn Kang (Callina Liang) who was asked to make a choice have to make a choice, either pay up in a good school such as Exton Pacific Academy or forgo the benefits completely? Lynn was one of those who went and presented them to the school principal, Irene Walsh (Sarah Jane Redmond). When confronted with the situation of going to an ordinary high school, it seems that Lynn could put on such a face that her father Meng (Benedict Wong) will never be bothered by a laundry shop that is going bad across the town. There is nothing to be shy about when Ms. Walsh talks about the scholarship and a reasonable amount of monetary support that she and Meng would be offering to Lynn and Meng, she supports Lynn’s ICY which is everything that Exton stands for.
Ms. Walsh intends to express herself clearly. ‘Quid pro quo’ is such a term, that if Lynn gets the scholarship, Exton has the opportunity to show that yes, it is a place that aims at welcoming all sorts of visitors. Also, Miss Walsh is not the first one who, despite knowing very well that Lynn is a possessed genius, tries to abuse her smartness. This is why she is already a player in the field which has been structured to always put her down.
Lynn lost her mother due to excessive factory pollutants and is now left to fend for herself with her tired, single parent. Lynn, like many immigrants, suffered tragic abuse as a child and looks forward to integrating Meng Zhihua into American culture. Meng embodies all of Lin’s aspirations and ambitions of making it in life; Meng is her hope. Lynn, being a first-generation immigrant child, has her share of difficulties including worrying about making new friends. It was Mary, Lynn’s mother, the sole companion Lynn had, who was just a memory as the only thing that was consistently in her heart was the music she played with Love. Lynn has no cause for concern, Meng claims; Lynn will finish her studies at MIT somehow. Lynn dreams of enrolling at the Julliard School to be a dancer, although the patience is commendable, they are not always accompanied by the appropriate preparations.
No one at Exton University is experiencing financial difficulties. It follows that Lynn Archer befriends Grace (Taylor Hickson), a drama student who does her best to maintain her average. Grace seems to be too self-aware to hold any kind of graciousness which would only betray that she possesses such talent, being the prettiest of the rich students at Exton. She applies to Lynn in all ways she can, then gets them to help her help Grace’s Math homework. Then she is told about Pat Stone (Samuel Braun), Grace’s wealthy suitor, who is prepared to take care of everything for her. If this girl works with him and some friends on their coursework, money will be no object. Grace is not pleased with this kind of relationship, but her shock comes when Walsh, a pupil who baits Meng into giving him $1000 for some cosmetic cream, and one of their mascots, Bank (Jabari Banks) is broke. His mother runs one of these chain rubs in Auckland city and he comes here looking for money for a celebration. We would henceforth refrain from saying “celebrate.”
To be fair, most of her classmates come from affluent backgrounds and yes, white. The only other person on Walsh’s level is Bank, who turns up only with a nondescript rivalry with Walsh as both are on the hunt for a college scholarship. Meng has two jobs for structural engineering companies and she has given up looking around Exton because there are Canadians from Seattle who are the elite class. If Exton is keen on playing mind games with her, she will beat them at their own game. Lynn, who pretends to have a high IQ, comes up with an absurd device that allows her to communicate during midterm napkin exams with her growing group of tutors while still communicating. There is nothing that is going well until one of the student monitors receives two papers because the range of scores of these students has been abnormally high in the light of their standing. It’s not late enough for Lynn to get expelled yet, but plenty of time still exists for her to have her father spend money that today, he can’t earn and pay off.
As we move along through the movie, certain events build up to a point where Lynn puts her plan B into action, which involves ‘stealing’ the SAT scores. Bank is forced to respond aggressively after being assaulted in front of his mother’s cafe on the day he decides to try out for the Cartwright scholarship. This film, like Ocean’s Eleven, tries to keep its audience in suspense while at the same time explaining to them the brilliant idea behind Lynn’s plan to fly to Philadelphia just so she can take the examination papers to her ‘friends’ in Seattle.
Bad Genius is not just any other heist movie; it also shows how the elite feel that they are above everyone else, treating those who serve them as subordinates. Whenever somebody assures Lynn a favour and fails to honour it, she must be disappointed, for by then, she already would have overlooked her two-faced friends. Everybody makes commitments, including parents, that their children will like all of their ancestors to return to the family home as graduates, and such children, regardless of their IQ or ability, will have to obey.
In a non-linear style with rapid cuts, there is no dull moment in J.C. Lee’s film. When all is said and done, however, everything fails to go according to how it was intended, which is caused by a monotonous sequence whereby the thrill of the rotation of the concepts to be sent that they had no business sending?’ overshoots the potential wreckage of Lynn, and Bank, who is an amateur survivorship, one of whom comes across as more fragile than what is presumed. There is, of course, Lynn, who has already worked out the math in her head, she’s a genius after all.
Callina Liang shone in her performance as Mei-lin Kang A daughter who has had quite some moving elements brought to bear on her. Her father loves her and she loves him, but in his attempts to make sure that she wins, one can see that his affection for her wellbeing is almost irrelevant. There is something poignantly sad about Meng as portrayed by Benedict Wong, who finally grasps how lost Lynn has been in her world and says what she has long wanted to hear, one of his daughters is all that one’s daughter needs, that’s all there is to it.
In the course of showing slim-to-no-fly politics, Bad Genius fails to analyze the broader impact of standardized tests on a lot of people. More specifically Black people. Most of these people are teenagers who come across as having a general sense of how unjust the system is. Bad Genius presented one more case of a stereotypical Madonna: ‘the good girl who went bad’ she was clever enough to play the part.
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