At this point, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to start a review by suggesting the streaming business has lowered our standards. The expectation, now, is cheap-looking, derivative and disposable – and the aim is purely consumable. At best, these B-tier streaming movies are fun, kicky, or knowingly smooth-brain. At worst, they’re offensive to your time.
How to Date Billy Walsh, a new teen movie from Prime Video, falls on the latter end of that spectrum. The England-set romcom from veteran TV director Alex Pillai, whose credits include Riverdale, Bridgerton and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, commits the cardinal sin in this content glut: it is boring, and its glaring flaws – from tone to shot choice to premise – only serve to underscore its failings, and not in a fun, Madame Web way. Even with diminished expectations, it grates.
Most of its issues boil down to a fundamental lack of charm, despite its strenuous efforts to force it through fourth-wall breaks by protagonist Archie (Heartstopper’s Sebastian Croft), who suffers from lifelong cowardice to tell Amelia (Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran), his best friend since birth, that he loves her. The script, by Alexander J Farrell and Greer Ellison (Hope Street, Butterfly Kisses), tries to be punchy with this material, peppering their friendship with bonding over farts, sex toys and a joke about his dick size, that come off, well, limply. Because movie logic, he’s rich and lives in what appears to be an amateur planetarium, she lost her mom to cancer, and both are losers at a school populated by the most thinly-drawn side characters possible – blond mean girl with eyebrows (Daisy Jelley), flamboyant gay boy with phone (Nael Ameen), a foul-mouthed headteacher (Guz Khan), and Archie’s loyal driver William (Nick Frost).
The film opens with a dirt-smudged, partially shaven-headed Archie hijacking Heathbrook Academy’s summer ball for a grand speech; it then flashes back to his plan, at the beginning of term, to tell Amelia he loves her while they watch their favourite classic horror film (they’re quirky!). Said plan is thwarted by the arrival of a handsome, motorcycle-riding, attention-grabbing American transfer student named Billy Walsh (Cobra Kai’s Tanner Buchanan). The title is a bit of a misnomer, as the film is barely concerned with Walsh (a mostly vacant nice guy with a winsome smile) nor the hijinks required for Amelia to get his attention. It’s more preoccupied with Archie’s state of mind as he scrambles to keep Amelia close and sabotage her puppy-eyed interest in Billy through increasingly indefensible means. Namely, by pretending to be an 80-year-old “love doctor” whom Amelia calls for (very bad) advice. (She got the idea from Archie’s bitter turned horny parents, if you can believe.)
This contrivance, via an AI digital-ageing app rendered in cheap sci-fi aesthetics, lands Archie in Dear Evan Hansen territory of objectionability and makes for unfavourable comparison to the amateur teen sex therapist in Netflix’s far superior Sex Education, also set in an English school milieu. It’s also a disservice to Chandran, who initially plays Amelia as smart and grounded, with the character saddled with sense-defying and humiliating behaviour and beholden to the needs of plot.
This summary makes the film sound more coherent than it is, as there is little rhythm to the scenes, the characters’ emotional logic or the tone, which shoots for heightened teen camp – mean girls throwing insults and milkshakes, choreographed group dances at the ball, a chorus of extremely cheap-looking “OMG” and laughing emojis on the screen – and lands somewhere between sincere, arch and comical, with the seamlessness of sandpaper. It’s a weird facsimile of a movie – plot with no momentum, plenty of character facts without substance, a pastiche of better movie moments and classic romcom notes. Even for lowered expectations or couch-day fluff, this is a skip.
• How to Date Billy Walsh is on Prime Video from 5 April.
