Bad Genius Review: Ocean’s Eleventh Grade

Bad Genius turns the story of one school’s cheating scandal into a blood-pumping thriller, but loses momentum fairly quickly.

The film follows a young girl named Lynn (Callina Liang) who uses her academic prowess to help her friends cheat their exams, making a fortune for herself in the process as she saves up for her Julliard tuition. With its short and snappy runtime, Bad Genius is a breezeful watch that shines in its high-tension moments which mirror even the most effective heist movies.

Despite its small scale (or perhaps because of it), Bad Genius’ first act is where the film really shines. When it’s just Lynn and her two friends trying to figure out how to pass answers under the teacher’s nose and get away unnoticed, that’s when the film really manages to make its concept work. There’s a kind of self-aware humour in the way that Bad Genius makes the most low-scale of cheating scandals seem like Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job through exaggerated close-ups and blaring music, which is the film’s greatest strength. Where the movie falters, however, is when Lynn’s conspiracy grows bigger and bigger, and consequently becomes much less personal.

It’s often good advice for a story to raise its stakes towards the end, and that’s certainly true in most cases, but Bad Genius loses much of its classroom charm once Lynn’s operation goes national and the stakes are suddenly through the roof. While there are certainly strengths to both approaches, the first half of the film clearly outshines the second with its small scale and metatextual sense of humour. That being said, the level of filmmaking on display in Bad Genius is both very impressive and pleasantly consistent: the visuals, the framing, and the camerawork are all engaging, and it keeps things moving at an easy pace from start to finish.

Although many of the characters often fall into simplified stereotypes, the actors involved in Bad Genius do a good job of making their roles interesting and engaging. Despite a few questionable decisions and motivations, Lynn is a likeable protagonist that audiences can mostly relate to, and her perspective is the perfect one for this story to be told from. Benedict Wong is the standout of the supporting cast, playing Lynn’s father with a deep sentimentality that makes their family struggles seem tangible and real; without that, the entire plot would fall apart and seem unrealistic. Jabari Banks also shines as Bank, another student involved in the cheating scandal whose complex dynamic with the rest of the group gives Bad Genius even more tension in its most blood-pumping moments.

Overall, Bad Genius is a great example of how to transform a superficially uninteresting story into something flashy and captivating by using genre conventions and tropes to subvert the audience’s expectations. It’s filled with creative decisions and non-linear storytelling that keeps things interesting throughout, but the story ultimately crumbles under the weight of the scale that it builds for itself. It works much better as a small-scale drama than the sensationalised thriller that it becomes, most notably because there isn’t quite enough substance or development to maintain such a wildly bold story. But as an experiment in switching up the cinematic form and blurring genre boundaries, Bad Genius is a noteworthy success.

Bad Genius will be released in US theaters on October 11, 2024. In the UK, the film is now available to watch on digital and on demand.

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