Bad Genius (2017) – Review

For everyone there has been a moment while you were attending school where it was very attractive to cheat in order to pass that difficult exam. To make sure you don’t get caught, you think of ingenious ways to bring along information that’s hard for others to discover. When you eventually decide to actually use it, it can lead to some very tense moments. You feel like a secret agent who can’t stand out and has to copy some information. If you would translate that feeling to a movie, you’d end up with Bad Genius. A mix of The Breakfast Club and Ocean’s Eleven…

Lynn (Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying) is a very good student who is even asked to study at a sepcific school and even gets offered a scholarship to do so. It doesn’t take long for her to become friends with other students. When one of them, Grace (Eisaya Hosuwan), panics for an exam it is Lynn who decides to give her the answers. It’s the first step to something a lot bigger. She’s approached to do this more often and even get payed to do it. She develops a system to share her answers and comes up with a plan to make even more money by selling answers for an international exam which is used to allow students to study in the US. It is extremely well guarded, so getting answers out seems almost impossible.

 The brilliant thing about this movie is the way the story is presented. It starts out with various characters being questioned during an interrogation, so you know not everything might have gone as planned. Meanwhile you get to discover how they all got to know each other and how Lynn has slowly changes from an innocent girl into a business woman tryijng to cheat the system, even though that might have impact on the relationship with her father. In real life exams are extremely boring to watch, but Bad Genius approaches them like getting into a bank vault in Ocean’s Eleven. It is full of moments with lots of tension and you are on the edge of you seat wondering if they will be able to succeed. It makes for a funny, entertaining and exciting movie which you should see if you can.

[score8]