How to Date Billy Walsh (2024)

How to lose friends and alienate people

I know I’m a sucker for the dumbest teen comedies. I’m like a pig in slop; and what’s worse, I sometimes even defend them as having something worthwhile to say about the youthful condition and the complexities of coming of age. But every now and again, I watch one and see it as so stereotypical and shallow that I pause and I wonder, “Are they all this bad, and I’m just now having a moment of clarity?” But, no, it’s just a bad movie. And How to Date Billy Walsh is just bad.

Some of it is surely that some of the humor lost in translation. This is a deeply British movie, to the point where there’s a gag that makes fun of the way that Americans interchangeably use “Britain” and “England,” and I didn’t even quite understand how the movie was making fun of me. But the tone and the timing is all sorts of off, the banter bizarre. I’ve seen this before: Sometimes British humor seems unnecessarily nasty and profane to me; not quite so much as Australian humor, but it happens.

But the problem with this film isn’t even really the comedy — though if it were a very funny movie I might forgive it more than I’m willing to — but just that it’s shoddily written and assembled teen romcom with miserable and/or dull characters.

The film is told from the perspective of Archie Arnold (Sebastian Croft), who is in love with his best friend Amelia Brown (Charithra Chandran). Archie is on the verge of confessing his long-held affection, but inexplicably freezes up when the moment comes. We actually get about six repetitions of this exact beat: “Gee Archie, what are you feeling? About me in particular?” — “Ummm uhhh errr, why would I be feeling something? You’re such a nerd Amelia!” Once would’ve been fine; by the third time my sympathy had vanished; by the sixth time I was hoping she’d end up with the other guy.

The film opens with an entirely pointless in medias res (a variation on the freeze-frame “this is me… you’re probably wondering how I got here” trope) of Archie looking beat up and messy, suggesting a long and eventful odyssey to get us to the climax. But we eventually learn all of that damage to Archie happens mere moments before the flash-forward started, and the “journey” there is underwhelming.

Cut back to the start of the school year. Amelia meets the American transfer student Billy Walsh (Tanner Buchanan) and falls head over heels. (He does have, as noted by an old lady in the film, some terrific bone structure.) Archie stews in jealousy but still refuses to declare his undying passion.

Here’s where the film enters evil mode: Amelia seeks the advice of a fabled “love doctor” to win Billy’s heart, and Archie creates a fake AI-generated old-man face and voice to pose as said love doctor in phone consultations. He gives Amelia intentionally humiliating and bad advice in her quest to win Billy over, which she inexplicably follows to a T even when it’s pure idiocy and ruins her life. Archie doubles down again and again on manipulating Amelia rather than telling her how he feels. It’s infuriating to watch; I was actively rooting against the guy.

Nearly everything about the film is ineffective. The soundtracking is generic pop songs mixed too loud. I like Chandran as Amelia, but Croft is Paul Rust with even more of the embarrassing neurosis and none of the inexplicable likability. Buchanan is a handsome slab of nothing. He wears exactly one (1) outfit the entire film — leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans. This is his wardrobe of choice as a school uniform, as a date-night fit, and as his get-up for the school dance. I guess maybe he switches from white T to black T once or twice.

The script has a few good zingers in it but is much more miss than hit. “Come on, Amelia: We’ve got geography and these bitches are history” is a solid line that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard in a high school comedy. “If you were on life support, I would unplug you for my third phone,” is solid, too, but would only be like the tenth-best device-related line of Do Revenge. On the negative side, Archie’s romantic monologues are outrageously bad dime store John Green imitations.

I’m not a stickler for these kinds of light comedies having exemplary craft in order to be fun to watch. The production and direction by Alex Pillai is mostly just unmemorably cheap-looking streaming-fodder. But one particular aspect seared my retinas off (bad version), and that is the lighting. It is utterly insane. The bloom on the streetlamps and sun-filled windows and all diegetic light sources is blown out and cranked up to 11. I mean take a look at this; it looks like this for the entire runtime. It gave me a headache:

From a logline level, this is a winsome best-friends-falling-in-love romcom, the kind of movie that has to hit a really low bar before I start complaining too much. But How to Date Billy Walsh hits that bar. If it had simply been about a fumbling, inarticulate loser stuck in a love triangle, I’d probably smile a little and move on. And there are a few stretches where it hits that pleasant vibe. But by making its protagonist a sociopath worth active disdain and giving us nothing else fun to latch onto, it’s a mean-spirited miss.

Is It Good?

Not Good (2/8)

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