This week in Generic Concepts Theatre is Prom Dates (now streaming on Hulu), the story of two high-school best friends fixated on making prom night the greatest moment of their young lives. Why, you may ask, are they so obsessed with prom? The only answer I have is, because there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. Of course, pointless movies can still be funny and therefore fun to watch, and this one features a couple of talented young actors in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series star Julia Lester and Ginny and Georgia lead Antonia Gentry. But it may take more than just some hard work from a couple up-and-comers to overcome the cliches of far too many raunchy neo-sex comedies.
PROM DATES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We begin with a literal blood pact: Besties Hannah (Lester) and Jess (Gentry) slice their palms and vow to have the best senior prom ever – and then there’s a mishap that likely ends in the ER with a few stitches being administered. Jump ahead a few years, and things are sort of on track, but not really: Jess is dating Luca (Jordan Buhat) just because he’s the fast-track to prom king-and-queendom; predictably, Luca is a vain chodemeister general who’s quick to belittle others, e.g., Hannah. Meanwhile, Hannah gets an overblown musical-theater promposal in front of the whole school from her boyfriend Greg (Kenny Ridwan), which mortifies her; the greater problem is, she’s secretly gay, and has yet to come out to anyone, even her BFF. So go the compromises we make to achieve our dreams.
As these things inevitably go, I get weary of these things inevitably going as they do, because those things are always predictably lousy. Jess catches Luca the Asshat cheating on her, and Hannah breaks Greg’s poor, fragile little heart – and with only two days til prom, they have to get desperate in order to not go to the dance alone like total losers. So, in a rickety plot development that only makes sense when you consider the main characters are teenage twits, they venture to the nearby Rutgers campus to attend parties and maybe snag some fresh dates. They drop in on a bash hosted by a perpetually slurring, perpetually bathing-suited entity known as Vodka Heather (Zion Moreno), and yes, there will be puke and antics (or wherever the twain shall meet) as they do hard drugs and end up comically commingling with moron jocks, rapey fratboys and lady strippers.
Some developments worth mentioning: Hannah crushes hard on the confident Angie (Terry Hu), but fears she blew the one chance to charm her. Greg won’t go away easily, either, as he desperately pursues Hannah. Jess maybe has an almost-acceptable thing happening with a football player, even though he makes Ralph Wiggum look like Oppenheimer. Jess also nurses a potentially destructive secret – she once slept with Hannah’s brother Jacob (JT Neal), which, in the pantheon of teen movies, is a betrayal worthy of public execution. This is one potent plot powder keg, people, hella potent. Question is, do you want to see it explode, or would you rather be watching a less derivative movie?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Everyone with a pulse will see that Prom Dates aims to be the ideal blend of Superbad and Booksmart; keep dreaming, Prom Dates, keep dreaming.
Performance Worth Watching: When Prom Dates switches tonal gears from grossout blecch to earnest blecch, Ridwan gets a heartfelt scene that rings true and pure and honest, and that the movie absolutely doesn’t deserve.
Memorable Dialogue: A telling interaction between Jess and a heavily concussed football player:
Football player: My coach says, one more concussion and I’ll have to learn to read again.
Jess: Oh, that’s awful!
Football player: I know. It was so hard the first time.
Sex and Skin: Some horizontal smooching and off-screen hands-down-the-pantsing.
Our Take: There’s very little in Prom Dates that entices us to give a damn. The main characters’ motives are foggy at best, and they’re very hastily defined as human beings. Desperation is a common trait among Movie Teens, but here, it’s the only tangible quality that defines Hannah and Jess; you’ll want to jump into the movie and grab them by their lapels and shake some character details out of them. Lester, the most charismatic actor of the bunch, tries to find some agency in Hannah’s coming-out dilemma, but the movie isn’t interested in letting it be more than just a plot point and an opportunity for some too-easy jokes. Early on, Jess exclaims that she didn’t get a Brazilian wax just to go to prom alone, and to that I say, Jess, dear, you should get a Brazilian wax for yourself, and no one else.
Bearing Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Productions banner, the film strains to be crass, as if it took a pile of laxatives to artificially induce the nastiness instead of letting nature take its usual disgusting course. We get blood, farts and plenty of barf, and while the characters are horny horny horny, they never engage in any activity that’s shocking enough to be funny. But the film isn’t content to be consistent in its wannabe-coarseness, as it takes a hard left into cheezy junk during the third act. Where it once treated characters like jokes, it all of a sudden doesn’t anymore, and we get a series of sincere speeches – including heartfelt one in front of the promgoing masses, sigh – that not only water down the comedy, but feel more like screenwriterly calculations instead of recognizable human behavior. Prom Dates would really, desperately love to be seen as an outrageous raunchfest with a heart, but it’s too unambitious to engage in any fresh ribaldry. Honestly, I doubt it even knows what ribaldry is.
Our Call: Feel free to dump Prom Dates the day of the dance. It doesn’t deserve you. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
