Throughout How to Date Billy Walsh, various bizarre artistic choices are on display as a romantic fantasy and a far more traditional teenage sex comedy merge, creating a movie with a severe identity crisis. How to Date Billy Walsh is now streaming on Prime Video.
Unfortunately, not even a talented young cast led by the fantastic Sebastian Croft, Charithra Chandran and Tanner Buchanan can save How to Date Billy Walsh from disaster! Theoretically, How to Date Billy Walsh should have worked by coupling John Hughes-inspired charm (think Pretty in Pink) with Sex Education-inspired comedy. But alas, Alexander J Farrell and Greer Ellison’s screenplay fails to deliver the goods from the outset despite an engaging cast and a veteran TV director, Alex Pillai, at the helm. How to Date Billy Walsh wants to be all things to all people and ends up a confused mess by over-stuffing its story with everything a teenage focus group might put on a flip chart when thinking about what makes the ideal rom-com.
Throughout How to Date Billy Walsh, various bizarre artistic choices are on display as a romantic fantasy and a far more traditional teenage sex comedy merge, creating a movie with a severe identity crisis. Idyllic hobbit-style houses, Rolls-Royces, sex jokes, pop classics, an 80s-inspired score, stereotypical mean girls and bad boys, and choreographed group dances are thrown into the final mix, creating a messy rom-com montage that lacks any individual identity or innovation.
Like the straight-to-VHS movies of the 80s and 90s and a host of new straight-to-streaming films today, there’s no doubt that Billy Walsh was dreamt up in a studio conference room rather than at a writer’s desk; Prime Video knows that due to the cast, How to Date Billy Walsh already has an eager young audience, but that audience deserved something better than this!
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