The Perfect Date Doesn’t Meet Expectations
The unofficial Internet Boyfriend, a.k.a. Noah Centineo, is back on the Netflix screen in The Perfect Date, a cheesy, teen rom-com that was good while it lasted, but will not stand the test of time.
The Perfect Date centers around Brooks Rattigan (Centineo), a high school senior whose dream is to go to Yale University. What he wants to do with his life besides that is beyond me. Brooks offers to escort a classmate’s cousin, played by Laura Marano, to her school dance in exchange for money.
With the help of his best friend, Murph, played by Odiseas Georgiadis, Brooks creates an app called “The Stand-In.” It gives girls the ability to customize Brooks’s personality for a date that they pay him to go on. On the app, Brooks’ money-making progress is shown with a map of him leading to Yale. It is unclear if Brooks has even applied to Yale, yet he acts as if he’s going there.
Issues in reality like this are what bothered me throughout the whole movie. While some moviegoers may be able to look past these inconsistencies, I cannot. They do not take too much away from the overall experience, but they definitely hinder me from giving this movie a 5-star review.
The other main con for me was that a couple of the key characters did not actually get the amount of screen time they deserved. Take Camila Mendes’s character, Shelby Pace, for example. Shelby was a very stagnant character and I would have liked to see more of her development and daily life but they kept her restricted to about only five scenes. In addition to that was Murph who started out strong in the beginning, disappeared in the middle, and then ended even stronger than he started. It would have been great to have more insight as to how he changed from what he was like to what he became instead of a gaping hole in the middle of a story.
Don’t get me wrong; any Netflix rom-com is worth your time, especially one with Noah Centineo, the connoisseur of playing the teen jock, outsider, and average kid. However, unlike his (arguably) most popular movie, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, The Perfect Date is not one that will be loved by fans in years to come. In fact, at its core, The Perfect Date is a worse version of To All the Boys.
Watch “The Perfect Date” while it’s still new to Netflix, but if you wait too long, you won’t even know it exists. I give The Perfect Date 3 out of 5 stars.
Hi, my name is Izzi and I am the Copy Editor on The Hawkeye. I am a senior this year and this is also my second year on staff. Outside of The Hawkeye,...