Jess (Antonia Gentry) and Hannah (Julia Lester) are two friend who many years ago made a blood pact to have the perfect prom and now, hours before the big night, they struggle in finding dates after breaking up with the ones they had.
Director Kim O. Nguyen has very little to offer in her first feature film other than a creativity-free zone. Prom Dates is a movie where its few redeemable aspects in no way make up for its many lacks. As a comedy it goes without saying it aims at humor, but alas, the "comedy" in the movie is nowhere to be found, on the contrary, it often had the opposite effect rendering the whole endeavor a humor-free zone. The characters are all unidimensional and unlikeable in every sense of the word, they go in their lives making uncalled sexual advances bordering abuse and when things do not go the way they want gratuitous violence is they preferred response. Like many teen comedies, its humor many times borders bad taste and manages to elicit anything but laughs. Hannah's proclivity towards vomiting is distasteful, to say the least. To aggravate things further, it has some musical numbers that will make you melancholic about the times when you had to at least try to sing well in order to sing a song. The song where Greg (Kenny Ridwan) proposes Hannah to be his prom date is terrible.
Sexuality is an explored concept in Prom Dates, but the many jokes at the expense of Hannah where a correlation is draw between clothe preferences and sexual orientation, as if being LGBTQIA+ equated certain dress code, is equally simplistic in its stereotyped belief as it is untasteful. As previously said, it has very few redeemable aspects. It is unfunny, badly written, with bad performances, lacking any profundity and plausibility, full of stereotypical characters, and promotes gender violence. It is terrible and definitely one of the worst movies of 2024.
