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According to teen movies through the years, prom night is the pinnacle of the high school experience—the most important experience of anyone’s high school career. And the Hulu teen comedy Prom Dates follows a couple of friends as they try to ensure that prom night is everything they’d ever dreamed it would be.
Prom Dates finds best friends Jess and Hannah (Antonia Gentry and Julia Lester) in a last-minute scramble to find the perfect prom dates. When they were 13, they made a pact to make their senior prom night the best night ever—dancing the night away with the loves of their lives. But then, the day before prom, Jess catches her boyfriend cheating and Hannah decides that it’s finally time to come out, and they find themselves with just 24 hours to find new dates and make their 13-year-old selves’ prom dreams come true.
As Jess drags Hannah from one college party after another in search of new prom dates, they leave a whole lot of chaos and destruction in their wake. They just barely avoid disaster involving an unexpected relative and a flesh-eating foreign student. They narrowly escape arrest. They fight and question their years of friendship. And, along the way, they gross out viewers with a whole lot of humor involving bodily fluids.
In other words, it’s a lot like the other outrageous teen comedies you’ve seen.
The characters here aren’t especially unique—or interesting. While Hannah has spent her teen years struggling with her identity (and stringing along her eerily obsessive boyfriend), Jess has apparently spent her teen years being shallow and selfish. Since they made their prom pact, it’s always been a given that Jess would be the prom queen—the one who gets the popular boyfriend and the sparkling crown while Hannah gets to look on with pride and admiration of her prettier, skinnier friend.
Though it tries to be shocking and funny and also heartfelt and insightful, this prom comedy is mostly just more of the same. And when it doesn’t know what else to do, it resorts to gross-out humor to distract audiences from the fact that it’s mostly just going through the motions.
While there have been prom-centered teen films that stood out as smart and thoughtful and genuinely funny, this isn’t one of them. It does have a couple of amusing moments, but Prom Dates is mostly just a rehashing of the same old outrageous teen comedy.
You can join these besties in their quest when Prom Dates premieres on Hulu on May 3, 2024.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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