Film review: Bad Genius (2017)

Netfix kept pushing this one at us and I finally gave in.  I was trying to think if we'd seen any other Thai films and I could only come up with Ong-Bak, a very different kind of film. This one is about (drumroll) TAKING STANDARDIZED TESTS!!! and, surprisingly, it's almost unbearably tense. Well, perhaps that's not too surprising, because taking tests is guaranteed to make one anxious, but the stakes might seem pretty low if you stop and think about it. It's set in a Thai high school (where the kids all wear school uniforms) where a poor girl, Lynn, daughter of a single father teacher gets a scholarship for being a (so far good) genius of sorts. She is befriended by Grace, a ditzy richer kid with an even wealthier boyfriend called Pat (at least, that's what they're called in the subtitles - their actual names seem absurdly (to us non-Thais) long). Lynn helps Grace out in one test because Grace has to get above a certain GPA to get into the school play.  Then Grace blabs to Pat and Pat offers to recruit a bunch of his friends and they'll all pay 3000 bhat (about $100) each for each test Lynn helps them cheat at.  Initially she is reluctant, but at some point she finds out that the school she's supposed to have a full scholarship for has been charging her poor old dad exorbitant sums in "tea money" and she feels that if they're going to make money on the side, she might as well.  She hides her activities from her dad by claiming to be giving music lessons, but really the "music" is just that she teaches each of her rich cheaters to associate particular hand movements (which correspond to a fragment of famous classical music) with letters on the test.  All goes well until in one particularly important test, it turns out that two different sets of questions are handed out, so she has to complete one, then switch tests with her neighbor to get the other and complete that (along with communicating the answers by handmovement).  This almost goes off without a hitch were it not for our other genius scholarship kid, Bank.  One of the dumb kids is so dumb he can't memorize the hand movements, so he tries to bribe Bank to take his test for him.  Bank (who is a goody-two-shoes, even poorer than Lynn, also the child of a single parent, but this time a mother who does laundry) is appalled and refuses, but then thinks he sees the kid copying off Lynn and blabs to the head teacher.  Now, up to this point both Lynn and Bank had worked as a team to win a "teen quiz" competition and had been chosen to compete to be the one student from school allowed to take an exam for a scholarship to study abroad.  But once Lynn's cheating circle is exposed, not only is she barred from that scholarship, her scholarship to the school is taken away.  Does she learn her lesson?  Briefly.  She gets dragged back into the game when Pat's rich parents return from abroad to find how well their son is suddenly doing and attribute it to Grace's influence, and so offer to send both of them to their alma mater, which, randomly, is Boston University.  But to get in they have to take an international standardized test, the  (presumably fictitious) "STIC".  Lynn doesn't want to do it, but then has a brainwave as to how she can earn potential millions (baht) in this scheme.  However, she has to have Bank's help, because it requires memorizing about 50 letter answers in the short time available after completing a section of the test, and that just isn't possible.  However, split between two teen geniuses....  Now, "as chance would have it" Bank is beaten up by a couple of (white) thugs who claim that he's scratched their expensive car, and he wakes up the next day (the morning of the test) in the middle of a disgusting landfill, covered in filth and unable to make it to the scholarship test.  This gives him incentive to join the scheme.  The scheme involves flying to Sydney, because the "STIC" is given at the same time and date all over the world, but Sydney is first, and if Lynn and Bank can text the answers to Grace and Pat, they can convert them to bar codes printed on pencils, and all their clients can take them into their Thailand-based STIC exams.  As you can imagine, things go wrong and it's unbearably tense.  Someone breaks bad.  Someone breaks good.  Lessons are learned.  Apparently this film is one of the most successful and decorated Thai films of all time, and certainly it's a slick little number that keeps you on the edge of your seat, and all four leads are well done, with Lynn being the standout.  Not the ending you might hope for, but I promise you you won't be bored.  Can you care about a film about test-taking?  Well, it convincingly portrays how destinies can be made or ruined by performance on these tests, so you will certainly get invested.