‘The Prank,’ directed by Maureen Gharoocha, stars two unlikely best friends, Ben and Mei, as they navigate the end of their high school senior year. Anxious, book-smart Ben, and the classic “programmer slacker” prototype Mei, devise a plan to take Mrs. Wheeler, a generationally hard ass physics teacher, down forever after she “unfairly” delivers a failing grade to Ben’s entire class.
Living in the age of The Internet, Mei has something to prove as a programmer, and uses her coding skills, as well as the power of a good rumor, to convince the whole school that Mrs. Wheeler is a murderer. One online deep fake turns into what feels like a mean-spirited mob as Mrs. Wheeler loses her life’s work in one afternoon.
For an indie film, ‘The Prank’ landed some big talent like Rita Moreno (West Side Story) as Mrs. Wheeler, Keith David (The Thing) as Principal Henderson and Kate Flannery (The Office) as Loretta the lunch lady. The leads are Connor Kalopsis as Ben and Ramona Young plays Mei in my favorite quirky performance in the movie. And while these two have an adorable relationship, including a matching sweatsuit rap performance, I appreciate that their relationship never dives into romantic territory and respects the mutual platonic relationship between two friends.
While I didn’t buy the mean-spiritedness of Moreno’s character Mrs. Wheeler, she did deliver some iconic looks. The leather pants. The gloves. A perfectly styled gray bob. Throughout the film I kept waiting for her to be more evil, but instead she only got more fierce. 🔥
Overall, the story never had the right pacing or high enough stakes for me to be immersed in the action. It might have been my own preconceptions of what was to come, but I expected more from Moreno and the kids as far as what she might put them through. Kidnapping and near decapitation are *obviously* very dramatic, but by the time we got there it was already too late for me. And while the payoff was fun, I would have loved another 20 minutes of cat and mouse between Mrs. Wheeler’s true evil and the perception of what she was.
Festival hype is real and while this film was not my favorite, being in the theater with an audience and hearing the cast and crew have fun was worth the watch. But if that cliffhanger was indicative of a sequel, I likely won’t be seeking it out.
