I think the story of cheating rich kids was an interesting one. Putting a poor Asian girl with a single dad and a black kid as 2 of the leads is very progressive but might feel fake to some.

I'm glad they got caught. Teachers aren't idiots.

I don't think they needed to drive up just how hard the SATs were to cheat in. You can bring programs on your graphing calculator that aren't allowed. It doesn't help much. You can put a dictionary in your calculator which can help with vocab if you memorize the questions for the scantron. Rich people used to get stand-ins to take the test for them. People write on the labels of water bottles. And compared to Asian entrance exams, studying for the SATs are a joke. Some districts give extra time (oh our students have disabilities). It detracts from the movie. The SATs don't even mean that much as more top schools are removing it as a requirement. Just glad they didn't do the usual Asian girl romance.

It takes a bit away from the movie when you make the least serious standardized test globally sound super important. Any rich guy who can't get a 1000 on their SATs can't get their grades high enough to get in through legacy.

Lynn (Callina Liang) is a brilliant student with no family money. His widowed father Meng (Benedict Wong) works tirelessly in his laundromat business. She gets a scholarship to a prestigious Seattle high school. She is befriended by rich girl Grace (Taylor Hickson) who slowly pulls her into the rich kids' world. They recruit her into passing answers to them. Bank (Jabari Banks) is the other smart scholarship kid in their class.

Apparently, this is adapted from a Thai film which I haven't seen. All I know is this movie needs a change in Lynn. I get the idea of a poor innocent Chinese girl being lured into doing bad by a bunch of rich white kids. It would be more fun if she starts the movie doing some scheme to make money. I would even accept a narration where she reads the people around her. She needs to be emotionally smart like she is later in the movie. The first thirty minutes are very standard and rather boring. It's downright uninspired. It takes a long time to get into something interesting. At times, I thought that Banks should be the lead character, but it really should be Lynn... with a change.