On April 13th, 2019, Netflix released The Perfect Date, a romantic comedy starring Noah Centineo as Brooks Rattigan, a high-school student trying to raise money to go to college. The film did not receive great ratings from professional critics; it earned only 5.8/10 stars on IMDb.

Brooks is a high-school student who works at a sandwich shop with his best friend, Murph (played by Odiseas Georgiadis), and has big dreams of going to Yale University. He volunteers to take a girl, Celia Lieberman (played by Laura Marano), to a dance for money and gets the idea to create an app where people can hire him to stand in as their dates.

In classic rom-com fashion, he realizes that a rich girl, named Shelby (played by Camila Mendes), is actually not the one he wants because he has been in love with Celia all along. With this realization, Brooks is able to see the importance of being himself, which is a positive message for all teenagers.

Ryan Bridges (‘20), an avid fan of the movie who has watched it five times already, said, “I really liked The Perfect Date and would recommend it 10/10. My favorite part is when Brooks realizes that he doesn’t want to apply to Yale because he would have to pretend to be a different person to get in. It’s a good message.”

Despite putting so much work towards going to Yale, and even lying in his interview about his extracurriculars (he tells the president he is a beekeeper), Brooks decides that he would rather go to the University of Connecticut, where he was offered a full-ride scholarship.

Logan Causley (‘22) said, “There’s no way he could have lied his way into Yale. But we thought it was kinda close to reality, about how sometimes people always put their academics first, before what’s at heart.”

The Webb Schools strives to maintain its college admissions rate, as 100% of its students are admitted to four-year colleges and universities. Like Brooks, us students want to impress the colleges that we apply to, so we worry over the classes we take, our grades, our testing scores, and our extracurriculars.

Thanks to the most recent college admissions scandal and the scandal with the T.M. Landry School in Louisiana, we know better than to lie on our applications and pretend that we are someone we are not, no matter how stressful the college application process is. Brooks Rattigan’s dishonesty during his interview at Yale alludes to these scandals, yet Brooks is capable of the personal growth it takes to just be himself.

With central themes of finding your identity and being yourself, The Perfect Date has found a way to relate to the complicated teenage psyche. However, as a romantic comedy, it lacks originality. The idea of “poor boy falls in love with rich girl and fakes it till he makes it” has already been seen before countless times, most notably in the 1987 film Can’t Buy Me Love.

Although The Perfect Date may be a fun movie to watch on a Friday night, its usage of generic rom-com tropes makes it boring and predictable. As Webb students, we may appreciate this simpler type of movie in order to relax after a stressful week at school, but it still lacks any substance which would make it more entertaining.