Worth: $11.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Sebastian Croft, Charithra Chandran, Tanner Buchanan
Intro:
Wacky and occasionally unhinged, the film is ultimately harmless and surprisingly fun...
Starring Heartstopper’s Sebastian Croft as Archie, the boy next door who has never kept a single secret from Amelia (Charithra Chandran), his best friend since birth. Never kept a secret except for one, that is — the kind of life-changing, earth-shattering secret that can make or break a friendship — Archie is head over heels in love with Amelia. Finally making his mind up to confess, Archie’s timing couldn’t be worse, with the arrival of American transfer student and all-round heartthrob Billy Walsh (Tanner Buchanan from Cobra Kai) on the scene, stealing all of Amelia’s attention (and if Archie doesn’t do something about it, her heart).
How to Date Billy Walsh covers every teen romance trope in the book and does it brazenly with a wink and a smile. For a nice change of pace, we do manage to sidestep the montage where the nerd removes their glasses and suddenly becomes the prom queen, instead both Archie and Amelia are refreshingly nerdy throughout, which is actually their most endearing quality. The plot, while predictable, at times borders on farcical. In homage to romcoms of old, but with a modern tech twist, Archie impersonates a “Love Doctor” using an AI filter in order to offer Amelia dating advice, which goes about as well as you’d expect. Despite narrating his struggles directly to the camera, Archie is far from the John Hughes adolescent philosopher we saw in Ferris Bueller. Instead, he fumbles his way through what is ultimately a pretty standard high school romcom, complete with the climactic scene taking place at the school dance.
While it’s customary for the majority of adults in teen films to be seen and not heard, it feels like a crime to have Nick Frost and Guz Khan in the cast and then give them a total of about ten words of dialogue between them. Still, Khan proves that he can commandeer a scene with a well-timed raised eyebrow, dialogue or no, but nevertheless it seems baffling to keep comedic stars of that calibre on the bench.
Wacky and occasionally unhinged, the film is ultimately harmless and surprisingly fun at times. Director Alex Pillai seems to have taken his time on the Riverdale set to heart and takes the story off the rails more than once with wild forays into Archie’s fantasies, for example dropping him smack bang into the middle of Night of the Living Dead, Archie and Amelia’s favourite movie. While the story is one that we’ve seen before and will no doubt see again, it’s moments like this where everyone involved chooses to be unafraid of their own ridiculousness that the film is at its best. Much like Archie and Amelia, embracing the quirkiness only serves to make it more endearing.
