We are back to regular service, or at least for this week anyway, as the next football matches aren't on till Friday and I watched England bravely fend off and defeat the mighty Germany last night. So I need a few days away from football for the moment. As it's Disney week here, I am looking forward to covering my first Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) this week with Genius, a coming of age tale about a child prodigy with a double identity. Sounds a bit deep for a DCOM to be honest...
Big Hockey fan and Physics genius Charlie Boyle (Trevor Morgan) enrols at Winsconsin College 5 years earlier than regular people do to study under his mentor, Dr. Krickstein (Charles Fleischer) and immediately regrets his decision when he immediately upsets his college hockey team roommates and finds out the facilities are old and dated... all goes particularly horrendous at first for perennially unpopular Charlie, deciding he needs a new way of making friends and discovering... a girl (!!!) in Claire Addison (Emmy Rossum), Charlie invents an alter ego; Chaz Anthony and enrols himself at Franklin High School to chase after her. Donning a leather trench coat and sunglasses that make him look suspiciously like the killers from the Columbine high school massacre (which happened literally months before this movie was released.... Jesus...) he goes about trying to be the cool kid; disrupting class, talking back to his teachers, the usual stuff. But unfortunately this does nothing to impress Claire... however in a stroke of erm... genius, 'Chaz' convinces Claire to be his after-school Tutor and the pair grow closer. Meanwhile life as Charlie Boyle isn't getting any better when his roommate, Mike (Yannick Bisson) embarrasses him in front of everybody during a class he's tutoring, but Chaz is doing alright and after he goes back to Claire's he discovers her dad is the Winsonsin College hockey coach! Suddenly Chaz and Charlie's lives start crossing over, especially when Chaz's science class are taken on a field trip to Charlie's Winsonsin lab and Charlie has to pull double duty as Charlie and Chaz, using blue ink and claiming he had a lab accident to hide his double identity. After the whole crossover incident Mike approaches Charlie for his help, fearing he'll get kicked out of College if the hockey team folds and in return he offers to coach Charlie on how to get with Claire. Later, Claire's dad's job is on the line if they can't win the big hockey game and after Charlie passes on some advise to his room mate and their star player; Mike, all initially goes well, but when Charlie's two identities get caught up, Claire discovers the truth and she does not take it well. Combine that with one of Charlie's experiments causing the ice rink to crack; the game to be postponed and Claire's dad to potentially lose his job and things go from bad to worse for Charlie. Somehow keeping his scholarship at Winsonsin, Charlie and Dr Krickstein make a breakthrough and discover a way to literally defy gravity and at the re-match of the big hockey game, convincing and enlisting the help of his old friends at Franklin, Charlie uses the technology to prevent the opposition from cheating to win, Winsconsin to go on to win and Charlie finally gets to kiss Claire.
This was alright, I mean they did that horrible bit where suddenly kids talk and act like adults twice their age at the end, which I hate, when they were putting the plan together and the acting was a little green in places, but generally broadbushly speaking it wasn't too bad... not really my kind of thing, I know nothing about hockey, and they did some bits that were wacky, and goofy, and bits that made no sense; like at the end - how could Charlie and Claire control the opposition players arms?... but erm anyway, yeah not bad.
It had everything about a TV movie all over it, it was short, comparatively, at 1 hour 25 mins but I've covered FTW movies about that length to be fair, and the production values were very much on par with a TV production. If you didn't know better this could have been a feature length episode of a Disney Channel TV show, but hey maybe that's what they were going for? I thought the Cinematography actually was a bit off; it didn't feel like it was shot as a movie. The angles, the lack of establishing shots, the transition shots were all very reminiscent of a show where you are expected to be familiar with the cast, and therefore; they aren't needed. It did help to make the movie easier to watch to be fair, with it not really feeling like a movie at all! But as a result it feels less like a movie, and more just like a TV episode.
The acting was green in spots, and everyone is just playing out their stereotypes; Mike is the cool jock guy who ends up needing the nerds help, the Doctor is a geeky, nerdy, socially awkward adult, Claire is the naïve, but clever pretty girl, it was only really Trevor Morgan as Charlie who was forced to switch between the two personas of being the nerdy bullied kid and the cocky, cool, arrogant kid which he did reasonably well with actually but unfortunately I felt like it really stereocast him almost instantly as the child star lead for made-for-TV movies and I couldn't imagine him doing anything other beyond that.
Everything about this film was also so very 2000's right down to the corny cock-rock soundtrack and the use of hip phrases; "cool man" "wesss-siiide" e.t.c that got a bit cringe very quickly and immediately dated it hard but I mostly found myself mentally comparing it to Flubber the whole way through; geeky (student in this case) guy / neer-do-well falls in love, majorly messes things up and has to put things right: with science. And I don't care what critics say; I thought Flubber was alright when I was like... 10... but I was getting real vibes that they were following almost exactly the same formula here with this movie.
So for my first dip of a toe into the dodgy waters of DCOM's, this was actually ok. Not entirely to my taste but an average enough movie about a boy trying to be something he isn't to impress a girl, failing, and then making good. It's a very tried, very tested formula, even by turn of the century, and we'll just conveniently ignore the shocking likeness to Chaz's dress code and the dress code of the Columbine massacre students... the less focus on that the better. Not bad. This was just not bad. I wouldn't watch it again but if you appreciated it I could half-way understand why. 3 out of 5.
