Prom Dates

Hannah and Jess have been friends for their whole lives. At 13 years old, they made a pact to make their senior year prom the perfect prom. However, 24 hours before the big event, everything is ruined when circumstances force them to break-up with their dates. Now, the pair have one rowdy night to find completely new dates, if they want to make their life long prom fantasies comes true.

The teen comedy, with all its wild hijinks and embarrassing missteps, is a classic staple of cinema, and the biggest current trend going on in that genre right now is to switch out the two nerdy desperate-to-get-laid boys with two nerdy desperate-to-get-laid girls, but with all the wild hijinks and embarrassing missteps remaining firmly in place. Representation! Huzzah!

This is basically what Prom Dates is.

So, quick and easy… Jess has wanted to be prom queen her whole life, but her boyfriend is a huge d-bag who won’t introduce her to his parents, and is really only ever interested in having sex. Hannah‘s boyfriend is too clingy and way too overly performative when it comes to professing his love, and his very public promposal redefined embarrassingly over-the-top, and also Hannah is a closet lesbian in love with a very butch girl in her class named Angie. Still, both Jess and Hannah are toughing it out, and going to prom with their dates because they made a pact five years ago to have the most epic senior prom ever together.

But when Jess catches her d-bag boyfriend cheating on her, and Hannah finds out that her smothering boyfriend has decided to transfer to the same college Hannah will be attending next year so that they can stay together forever, both girls reach the same realization.

It’s time to break up with their boyfriends.

Too late, they both realize that this also derails their epic senior prom plans, and that they now need new prom dates by tomorrow night.

And thus, the plot.

Also, Jess has secretly slept with Hannah’s older brother, and she’s been hiding that from Hannah. Meanwhile, Hannah has been feeling under-appreciated by her longtime best friend Jess. So, the pair has some secrets coming to a boil too.

After that, Prom Dates is a pretty bog standard teen comedy. There’s some hijinks, some more hijinks, then a few more hijinks for good measure. In a nutshell, there’s a plethora of hijinks going on here, people. A plethora. There’s also more than a few embarrassing missteps and misunderstandings as well.

Then, around the film’s midway point, our heroes have a big falling out at this super kick-ass college party, that they used wacky hijinks to bluff their way into, despite the fact that this "cool" college party looks like it was sponsored by the local Christian youth group, a group that is obviously fundamentally incapable of understanding just how uncool they are. It's at this moment that all secrets are revealed, old grievances are aired, and a few angry recriminations are made. But fear not, faithful viewers, everything works out in the end once they finally get to Prom. Now, it may not all work out in a way either girl originally envisioned, but it does work out in what is undeniably the right way, not to mention the most satisfying way too.

Is it silly? Yes. Is it overly broad and burlesqued? Yes. Is it all a little contrived? Yes. Are all of these high school students and college undergraduates clearly being played by people who could possibly all be well into their thirties? Also yes.

It’s fair to call Prom Dates the actual female version of Super Bad, way more than Book Smart was. The leads' chemistry was great, and despite being peppered with moments that have that vague failed “improv” scene feel, it’s not bad. Especially for a film that mostly feels like the failed pilot of a lesser known teen show. It's not an all-time teen comedy classic by any stretch... but it's not all that bad either.

Also, side note...

I’m really glad “promposals” weren’t a thing at all when I was in high school a million years ago. It’s a really stupid, really weird, and a kind of creepy tradition that somewhat irresponsibly allows teenagers to put too much emphasis on the significance of their prom dates, as well as on the idea of prom itself. The whole idea of treating the act of asking a date to prom as if it were on the same level as say... a wedding proposal or something, implies way too heavily that this will have a more serious and lasting importance to a person’s life then it actually does, and all at a time when these kids are too young, too dumb, still too unformed to really understand that nuance.

I feel like Reality TV is somehow to blame for this.

I mean, I get it. It’s important in the moment, and in the context of these kids’ lives, but you’d think, as a parent, you’d want to discourage them from acting like they’re getting married, or that they’re even going to remember this person in five years, to maybe just… put the whole thing in perspective a bit. At the very least, I’d think you’d try to steer them away from making huge public fools of themselves.

Anyway, I’m old…

Back to the topic at hand...

While this film is all about the wacky hijinks and whatnot, and it very obviously ends with Hannah and Jess getting everything they wanted, even if it’s not in a way they planned, all while discovering that all along, all they ever really needed was the power of each other’s friendship, I was impressed by the way the film pointed out how incredibly selfish and self-centered both Hannah and Jess really were throughout the film. That was a unexpected bonus.

Basic and familiar and not all that surprising, but still cute enough, with a cast that is definitely talented, I was mostly left wondering if kids today, the target audience to watch films like this, will notice that most of the plot lines don’t actually connect at all, and that pretty much all of the cathartic moments are unearned, and that the jokes are the equivalent of a flurry of spaghetti hurled at the wall, some of them sticking, but most of them not even coming close.

Then I wondered if teen films have always been like this...