‘The Perfect Date’ (2019) Review

The Perfect Date Synopsis: To save up for college, Brooks Rattigan creates an app where anyone can pay him to play the perfect stand-in boyfriend for any occasion.

High school senior Brooks Rattigan (Noah Centineo) has college expenses piling up, so he volunteers to take a classmate’s cousin to a high school dance in exchange for payment. Celia (Laura Marano) is difficult and unhappy from the very beginning of their date, snarky despite Brooks’s efforts to have fun with her.

However, after the dance, Celia jokes about Brooks making a business out of being a chaperone for girls who need dates, and he realizes that’s not entirely a bad idea. So he creates an app with his best friend Murph (Odiseas Georgiadis) called The Stand-In, where girls can order Brooks to be whatever guy they need him to be for various dates. Needless to say, the app takes off, as does Brooks’s “dating” life.

Eventually, Celia calls Brooks and asks him to pretend to be her boyfriend at a party to get her crush’s attention, Franklin (Blaine Kern III). The party is also at the house of a girl who caught Brooks’s eye at Celia’s high school dance, Shelby Pace (Camila Mendes), so Brooks jumps at the chance to escort her there.

Shelby also shows interest in Brooks, but as Shelby believes Celia and Brooks are dating, the two decide to plan a public break-up at an upcoming birthday party so both will be free to date their respective crushes.

Given that this teen rom-com stars Noah Centineo, the breakout star from last year’s delightful To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, it’s inevitable that the two movies will be compared. That’s not entirely fair because, beyond the somewhat familiar premise (teenagers fake dating who fall for each other!), The Perfect Date misses out on a few things that made TATBILB so endearing.

For one, Brooks Rattigan (a name that sounds like it belongs to an ’80s rom-com villain) is a bit bland. He is essentially Peter Kavinsky-lite suffering an identity crisis. Centineo is charming, but Brooks is not. If anything, he’s a bit selfish, and he neglects Murph while also treating his depressed but well-meaning dad (Matt Walsh) pretty poorly.

Shelby is nothing more than a cookie-cutter, pretty, rich girl who knows nothing about Brooks other than he’s dating Celia. Besides being rich and popular, we don’t know anything about Shelby either, and why should we? Shelby serves no purpose other than to help Brooks reach his epiphany about his feelings for Celia. Celia’s crush, Franklin, is as much a stereotype as Shelby. He is a gentle, artsy soul who loves vinyl records and pretentious coffee bars and reveals himself as a street artist. He also spends too much time comparing Celia and Brooks to dung beetles. Cue the eye-roll.

However, Celia is The Perfect Date’s saving grace. Initially, I found her pretty irritating, simply because the aggressively quirky “IDGAF, so I need to be a bitch for no reason” trope is not one of my favorites. Thankfully, when Brooks takes her to Shelby’s party, the character has softened a little and becomes genuinely likable throughout the movie without losing her snarky edge.

The first half of The Perfect Date centers around Brooks’s creation of the app and the following dates, but that is more of a montage than anything of substance. The app and the dates then essentially disappear, shifting focus to Brooks, Celia, and their shallow crushes, but we don’t know enough about any of them to honestly care about the outcome. It’s a shame because sticking to the idea of the dating app could have made for some fun, conflicting moments later on in the movie. Instead, it just felt rushed, especially in the last twenty minutes.

Centineo and Marano have some nice chemistry, making the film semi-watchable, but the story itself is relatively thin. All in all, I found The Perfect Date to be an okay, run-of-the-mill romantic comedy, but probably not one I’ll add to the rewatch list.

Watched: 04/12/2019
Notable Song: The Man by The Killers