First Hit: Good girl and bad boy, a predictable sappy story of young romance.
This film is made for young teen girls as witnessed by the number that showed up for the early Friday afternoon showing I attended. Cell phones screens lit the anticipatory faces of these young audience members and unfortunately, they kept looking at them during the film.
The Story: Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) is headed to college. Her mother Carol (Selma Blair) has worked hard to create this opportunity for her daughter. Tessa is smart, pretty, and wholesome. Her boyfriend Noah (Dylan Arnold) is a senior in high school and a year behind her in school. He’s wholesome and is liked by Carol.
Arriving at her dorm room, both Carol and Noah are taken aback by Tessa’s roommate Tristan (Pia Mia). She’s hanging out with another fellow girl on the bed, and she’s pulling on an electronic cigarette while dressed in a very skimpy outfit.
Carol immediately wants to go to the housing authority to find her daughter another room. Pulling her mother off the ledge of embarrassing her, Tessa tells her mom, “let me figure this out on my own.”
Getting to know Tristan loosens Tessa up a little and when she goes to a party Tristan knows about; she’s out of her element. At the party she meets the bad boy, Hardin Scott (Hero Fiennes Tiffin). During a truth or dare, Tessa is asked to kiss Hardin, she is lulled into getting close, but pulls away at the last second. Walking through the party’s house, she stumbles into Hardin’s room and sees all the books on his shelves. He comes in, she’s interested to follow through with the kiss, but she also wants to honor her relationship with Noah and pulls away again.
The stage is set because they both have had absentee fathers. We learn more about why Hardin has such a sad view of love and relationships through his upbringing which is demonstrated through a classroom discussion. We also see Tessa’s cautiousness towards intimacy because her father walked out when she was very young.
The story goes back and forth with Tessa and Hardin getting together and then splitting up. She’s naïve to some of the life that Hardin has lived. There are moments of wonderful tenderness between the two and then there are moments of coldness by them.
The pacing of this story is slow, and it isn’t difficult to know where the movie is going and why. I’m not sure how well it held the audience it was meant for, because a whole row of young girls got up and left two thirds into the film. Additionally, two others in the row in front of me left in the last fifteen minutes.
Langford was okay in this role. There was nothing outstanding about her performance and it was believable. It was good to see Blair again, it has been some time since she’s been in a film role and she was good. Tiffin was mediocre as the bad boy. It was predictable and there was nothing that really made his performance stand out. I didn’t think there was much chemistry between him and Langford. Arnold was good as the, wise beyond his years, high school boyfriend. Mia was strong as the slightly edgy fun lesbian roommate. Jennifer Beals and Peter Gallagher were good as Hardin’s new mother-in-law and father. It was a pleasant surprise to see Beals again. Susan McMartin wrote a slow-moving predictable story. Jenny Gage directed in a way that ended up feeling compromised and mediocre.
Overall: I patiently waited for this film to end and left knowing it wasn’t worth the cost of making it.