REVIEW: ‘Prom Dates’ Is So Mid

Directed by Kim O. Nguyen and written by D.J. Mausner, Hulu Original movie Prom Dates starts with some potential. Two best friends swear to each other when they’re young that one day, they’ll go to prom with the loves of their lives. Senior year is coming to an end and Hannah (Julia Lester) is less than enthused about going to prom with her boyfriend Greg (Kenny Ridwan).

Meanwhile, Jess (Antonia Gentry) is obsessed with her incredibly annoying boyfriend (Jordan Buhat). But Jess finds out he’s cheating on her and Hannah finally admits to herself she’s gay, so they’re both dateless the night before prom. The pair set out on a string of capers to try and find dates before it’s too late.

Prom Dates is trying too hard to be Booksmart without Booksmart’s strong writing or its excellent cast. It does several things very well and just as many quite poorly. The opening act feels mostly genuine. Hannah and Jess’s relationship comes across naturally. Jess’s fixation on her crummy boyfriend is spot on for the kind of kid she is: obsessed with being perceived as cool and popular. It doesn’t matter that he’s awful to Hannah, let alone to her, she’s just excited to be dating the hot soccer captain. Granted, you can tell she’s not completely devoid of self-awareness. She doesn’t let him take advantage of her in any of the ways he tries.

Hannah is written pretty well too. But Greg is possibly one of the most annoying and uninspired characters imaginable for most of the movie. Then he winds up being simply the worst in the end. But you can still see why Hannah gets trapped dating him for nearly a year despite knowing she’s gay and not interested in him. When she does come out to Jess early in the movie, the scene rings true. So does the general shape of their pursuit of new prom dates. But before delving into what immediately ceases to work about Prom Dates, an important note about authenticity.

You cannot set your movie in a specific place and drop specific names of locations if nothing about that place is remotely accurate. Prom Dates is set in New Jersey and a substantial portion takes place, supposedly, at Rutgers University. However, every exterior shot is filmed in Syracuse, New York. Syracuse, New York and New Brunswick, New Jersey couldn’t look more different than each other. The kinds of fancy-looking buildings and fountains and the types of houses with large backyards and pools seen in this movie might have been passable if the movie took place at Princeton, a New Jersey university much more visually akin to Syracuse. But New Brunswick? Not a chance.

The parts of the movie that take place before arriving at “Rutgers” are already a tough enough sell. The very obvious New Jersey license plates don’t line downtown streets that look much like any New Jersey town I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen most of them. High schoolers who live in the parts of New Jersey that could fathomably have the kind of culture and wealth Prom Dates displays would never for a second consider driving at least 40 minutes just to try and find a college kid to ask to the prom. Also, about a quarter of all Rutgers students are Asian. There is nothing about the student body at the college parties in the film we see that looks remotely like the student body of a Rutgers party. Shoutout to the one great NJ-themed sight gag at the end of the movie though.

There is simply no reason to specify that your movie takes place somewhere it so clearly doesn’t. While the vast majority of people watching will have never stepped foot in Central Jersey, let alone believe it’s a place that actually exists, those who call it home will find this detail incredibly distracting. And unfortunately, the rest of what actually happens in Prom Dates is just not good enough to recapture that attention. The shade of red the movie uses for Rutgers signage isn’t even correct.

For all the ways Prom Dates excels at using profanity and lewd talk to make its Gen Z characters feel believable, ultimately, writer D.J. Mausner is just not a Zoomer. There’s an uncanny knowingness to Hannah and Jess’s comedy and the maturity of the characters around them. It’s like they’ve been refined by years of real-life experience they certainly haven’t had. The uncanny becomes abrasive over time and results in dialogue that has some good laughs but is too stilted the rest of the time.

Many of the mid-movie escapades are fairly run-of-the-mill. There are two ongoing sequences where Hannah and Jess are both trying to pick up a date that go horribly wrong. One is actually pretty funny and well done. The other is just so odd that it’s hard to laugh at, even if the effort is somewhat admirable. This tonal dissonance is Prom Dates’ constant struggle.

By the time the friends have their big fight, there’s nothing about it that feels genuine to who these teens are. They’re having the most petty argument while contemplating driving intoxicated. Movies need tension, sure, but they don’t need it foisted upon them like this. At least one of the two dumb ongoing gags in this scene sort of pays off for a laugh.

The last act pulls it back together a bit, at least. All the time spent in the college world is a good reminder that high school isn’t the end-all-be-all of the human experience. The movie’s older and more mature characters, even if they’re thinly written, add a little reality check to the quickly unraveling teenagedom. Until, again, the tone goes haywire and the petulant arguing returns.

It culminates in an awful scene between Hannah and her ex that undoes a lot of the movie’s good coming-out depiction by making Hannah out to be the bad guy for not coming out on her own terms. Even if there’s a somewhat valid point being made about honesty and not leading people along, it still feels wrong shaming her.

Prom Dates has some highlights, but like most proms, it’s completely forgettable. It’s too caught up in trying to be a mature version of a YA story that it forgets it’s still a movie about teenagers. The soundtrack is bland until the credits, there are several instances of horrendous ADR, and the movie very clearly doesn’t take place where it’s supposed to be set. And yet at the same time, it’s so busy being a movie about teens that it forgets it’s a mature comedy and not just a teen rom-com. It can’t keep its tone straight, even as it sticks the landing sufficiently.

Prom Dates is streaming now, exclusively on Hulu.