POPULAR THEORY - Mark Reviews Movies

Popular Theory, Blue Fox Entertainment

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | February 8, 2024

The camera pans across a row of high school juniors, and somewhere in the middle of the line is just the top of a girl's head. She's Erwin (Sophia Reid-Gantzert), who is barely a teenager—if she actually is—and has skipped four years of schooling. This girl is a certifiable genius. That also means she is regularly alone, doesn't have any friends, and spends her time after school and on weekends shut up in her room formulating little experiments. Erwin's okay with that for the most part, and Popular Theory is kind of refreshing in letting her feel that way and not assuming that she needs to be different to be happy.

That sentiment goes a long way in co-writer/director Ali Scher's movie, which is a cute, silly, and amusing comedy aimed at kids who might be a bit like its protagonist and feel the way she does, too. It's tough to be the outsider, so it's nice to see a character who more or less embraces her status, loves the way she is, and doesn't feel too much pressure to try to fit in with any of her peers.

Somewhere deep down, she would like to be seen as cool and popular, to be sure, because Erwin is, after all, a teenager or very soon to be one. It doesn't define her, though, and that level of confidence is a source of either admiration or, depending on how she might use her smarts, worry. The nerds already have taken over the world, and for all the benefits, it hasn't gone too well, either.

Scher and Joe Swanson's screenplay seems to have that idea in mind, too, because the whole plot, which is the stuff of childhood fantasy, turns out to revolve around the ethics of using brain power to affect society. Erwin and her school "colleague"—not friend, she insists repeatedly—Winston (Lincoln Lambert), a new student who's almost as smart as her, come up with a formula that can make anyone popular. It could change the world, but would that be for the better or for something much, much worse?

This isn't exactly what one might expect from a movie that's otherwise so busy trying to be funny, so over-the-top in its characterizations and central conceit, and so pre-occupied with stylistic flourishes that an unnecessarily noticeable amount of screen time is devoted to orchestrating scene transitions. In other words, the movie gets in its own way in a few too many ways by making such an effort to be clever, instead of recognizing that the whole setup and the direction this story heads in are already pretty clever.

There's Erwin, for one notable thing, who's written and performed as a precocious kid of that trickiest kind. She's never annoying, despite how much she explains, how often she corrects, and how her dialogue sometimes sounds a bit too much like an adult's idea of how an intelligent child would talk. Reid-Gantzert is responsible for much of the character's charm and unexpected confidence, and any clunky moments involving the character are certainly on account of the screenplay laying it on thick.

Erwin is named after the physicist Schrödinger by her late scientist mother, and the girl keeps a poster of the scientist on her wall and talks to it like the picture's her lab partner. This worries her aunt Tammy (Cheryl Hines), who's helping Erwin's father Arthur (Marc Evan Jackson) raise the girl and her older sister Ari (Chloe East). Concerned her niece is antisocial and that it might impact her life negatively, Tammy bans Erwin from doing any extracurricular science projects.

The timing couldn't be worse. The state science fair is approaching, and the winner receives a scholarship to attend an exclusive, expensive science camp for the summer.

She has come up with a sure-fire winner of a project, too: a chemical that produces pheromones that will trigger a hormonal reaction in the smeller and make the user popular. Since Winston's good at chemistry, she begrudgingly enlists his help, and the two secretly develop the popularity chemical.

The rest of the plot is fairly predictable, until it decidedly isn't. The two young scientists pick a couple of willing test subjects (One's a comic book geek whose opinions are so stubborn and odd that even his comic-loving peers find him irritating), observe the results, and get to know each other better in the process. The whole of this part ends up being a one-joke setup, in that Erwin and Winston are very smart, speak in very technical and grown-up terms, and bicker until they realize how alike they are. The gag runs thin quickly, but the characters are likeable in their nerdy confidence, at least.

A big change, though, happens when the chemical starts to work, Erwin decides to dismiss her objectivity and try it herself, and the newfound popularity of the test subjects goes to their heads. The payoff is smart and funny, while offering up a good lesson about the (in this case, literal) tyranny of popularity, as well as one for Erwin to learn about how much she has needlessly shut herself off from others. Popular Theory clearly means well, and while that—like the portrayal of the main character—is worth something, it doesn't quite make up for the labored nature of the humor and characters.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products