The Perfect Score is a lame excuse for a heist movie, wrapping itself in the trappings of John Hughes', whose films are way out of The Perfect Score's league It tries to pass itself off a teenage class drama, like The Breakfast Club, but succeeds only in delivering bad comedy and boring us to death.
What's even worse, is that Scarlett Johansson is in it, sullying her name by rolling around in garbage, right on the heals of multiple awards nominations for her fantastic work in Lost in Translation. She turns in the only performance even worth nothing in a brainless piece of teen fluff not fit to adorn even the shelves of your high school aged cheerleader.
The idea is that a bunch of stupid kids need to steal the SAT's, since they aren't smart enough to get good grades on their own. You see, the SAT's are evil, because they discriminate against brain dead idiots, keeping them from getting into good colleges, and by extension getting all the same great jobs that all the smart kids get. Perfect Score's premise is basically that smoking weed, beating up nerds, and attending really great parties instead of studying shouldn't prevent one from going to Harvard. Of course the best way to right this social injustice is to cheat.
Thus the stupid kids recruit smart kids to help them execute a poorly planned heist in which they attempt to steal answers to the SAT's. Don't worry; it isn't all crawling through ceiling ducts. The kids stop now and then to sit on an air vent, and discuss the differences between them. In the end, the brainy Goth chick falls in love with the clueless loser, the jock becomes best friends with the pothead, and the pretty boy is just as pretty as he was when the movie started. He'll be an architect one day, because he once built a birdhouse out of popsicle sticks.
Johansson's character, (as mentioned before, the only one worth noting) is a disaffected Goth chick, who sports a lot of piercings and an affinity for fish net stockings. She hates her single father because he likes to have sex with women, and joins the group only because she's looking for friends. Pull her out of this movie and give her her own story, and maybe you'd have a mildly interesting three star flick. But she's only 1/6 of this film, the other 5/6's being a vapid wasteland of soul sucking mediocrity and Kelly Clarkson look-alikes.
The heist is uninteresting and impossible to follow. The kids are pathetic rip-offs from better films. The few laughs The Perfect Score does offer aren't enough to offset an overload of confusion and boredom. Teenage stereotypes have seldom been done worse than this.
