How often do we let ambition get in the way of friendship? How often do we prioritize our wants and our supposed lifelong desires over real-life experiences, letting the things we believe are right, cloud our judgement as life slowly passes by us?
A whole day of mentally gruelling classes and other serious issues seemed to weigh heavily on my mind. So my next port of call was to see a movie. I had two options but comparing the trailers, I decided that one had a rather compelling and serious storyline, while the other was more like a nice chick flick that wouldn’t require me to invest too much of my emotions into it. So after a bit of deliberation, I decided to watch,
Prom Pact is an American romantic comedy. It’s directed by Anya Adams and premiered on the 30th of March, 2023 on Disney Channel, invariably making it a Disney film. As a lover of the works of Disney(mostly the cartoons anyway) and held my breath and waited eagerly expectantly for the watch.
The movie begins starring Mandy Coleman Yang, a social outsider who’s portrayed as feminist, ambitious and apathetic towards the swirling and bustling high school life around her. Her best friend, Ben, is also a social outsider but doesn’t exactly share Mandy’s views on school-life apathy. He yearns for a bang to complete their senior year but it’s met with disdain by Mandy.
The environmental setting of their school revolves around the Prom Season which is at its peak, complete with Promposals which is exactly what the name implies and the whole 80s shebang which is the theme of the year’s prom. Mandy has always wanted to study at Harvard and after finding out that she had been waitlisted, she goes to the school’s Guidance Counsellor, Mrs. Chen for advice. Twisting her words unfortunately, Mandy devises a plan to get to her dream school by getting a recommendation letter from Senator Lansing, an alumnus of Harvard by tutoring his son, Graham Lansing, the captain of the school’s basketball team.
Graham is the cliché narcissistic jock as perceived by Mandy but upon tutoring him, she finds out that there is more to him than meets the eye and that maybe the stuck-up athlete gets less credit than he truly deserves. A sense of camaraderie and other endearing feelings begin to swirl between them when Graham proceeds to ace his AP Psych test which had been a bane to his existence and also have a friend in Mandy with how differently she makes him feel respectively.
However, trouble brews when Mandy’s ambition invariably makes her indecisive and almost causes her, her best friend and her love interest. It’s the climax of the movie and Mandy must decide whether or not her dreams of being at Harvard outweighs her loyalty and values.
The story line for starters wasn’t really interesting. Again it portrayed an overly used plot that gravitated from cliché to slightly embarrassing. The plot was predictable and the dialogue lacked all forms of realism making the supposed comedy in its genre fall flat as the humour was lacking and the pacing slow, making the movie appear longer than its 90-ish minutes.
One of the worst things that can happen in a movie, in my opinion, is when the audience is indifferent or even worse, despise the main character and without saying too much, I would say that this was my experience while watching Prom Pact. Mandy as a character in the movie was to me, selfish, highly opinionated and extremely manipulative. Her role as an activist or feminist isn’t properly developed and the overly pious ways that she was presented did not endear me to her in the least.
Overall Prom Pact wasn’t a likeable film because the actors lacked authenticity in the interpretation of their roles making the film mediocre, to say the least. I couldn’t connect to it because of the unrealistic plot, the poor performance of the characters, especially the lead one that was unlikeable and the mere fact that it just failed to entertain me or evoke feelings that would make people want to watch it again. So I’ll give it a 4 over 10 and wouldn’t recommend anyone watch it either. It wasn’t a total waste of my time though. I got to listen to some pretty cool songs from the 80s.
Other images are from the movie screenshots.
