★
To save up for college, Brooks Rattigan creates an app where anyone can pay him to play the perfect stand-in boyfriend for any occasion.
Classification: 12A
The Perfect Date is a film balancing two different romantic plotlines, a fake romance where the two characters Brooks Rattigan and are hoping to date others but end up falling for each other. In tandem with a storyline where Brooks is making money off an app where he works as a fake boyfriend on various dates. These storylines flow together but never work together to create a satisfying romantic comedy.
The characters aren’t particularly interesting or likeable, Noah Centineo’s performance as Brooks is a bizarre mix of narcism and self-pity. He believes his life is the worst and that attending Yale is the escape he needs but that also he is the best because he’s not a self-absorbed rich kid. He is a character who is both charismatic and annoying, I want to punch him in the face, which isn’t the reaction you want from the leading man. The female lead Laura Marano doesn’t fair better with a similar personality, a spoiled rich kid who doesn’t want the attention. They’re your basic high school teenagers, not the worst people in the world but probably the most annoying.
The director Chris Nelson isn’t actually sure what he wants the film to focus on and it makes the story of the film boring to go through. As the film jumps between its two narratives and tries to create drama and friction between the characters it just can’t deliver. There are scenes where Brooks struggles to justify why he wants to go to Yale and instead uses other’s people’s interests and personalities as a distraction from answering the question of who he really is. The film intends this to be a character masquerading from one persona to another and how one is able to see through his bullshit and fall in love. Technically that’s what happens on paper but it feels so shallow and unearned that when Brooks reaches his lowest point you don’t really care if he can come back from it.
The humour doesn’t really stand out in this rom-com, Centineo’s charm in his scenes comes from his plucky attitude but the writing just can’t back it up. With a premise that has as much comedic value as this, it is completely wasted as The Perfect Date is more focused on teenage melodrama or existential teenage angst. At points the dating app feels like an afterthought in the script despite it being critical to the narrative, the whole film feels half-baked and that failure resides in the scripts inability to bring the most interesting ideas forward.
The Perfect Date is far from perfect, with nothing to laugh at or romantic scenes to swoon for, this romantic comedy falls flat at every turn. Centineo’s natural charisma carries the film for a bit but its lacklustre script weighs so much of him down that there is nothing here to work with. It offers nothing memorable or new with its main fault being its failure to use its premise properly.
Director: #ChrisNelson
Release Date: April 12th 2019
Available exclusively on Netflix.
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images and Synopsis from the Internet Movie Database
Comments