Better Luck Tomorrow – Review

As the gated community entrance slides open to the cookie cutter California suburb behind it, a sloppy ice cream van is chased by kids on a hot day. High school kids Virgil Hu (Tobin) and Ben Manibag (Shen) lay in the sun, Virgil smoking, and the pair talking about college admissions.

Eventually a cell phone rings, but it’s not theirs. They frantically start digging through the grass to find what is ringing behind them. What they find is unexpected, and cause for serious alarm.

Flashing back to earlier in the year, Ben works at a hot dog stand by day, and applies to Stanford, Harvard and more by night. You just can’t count on good grades alone anymore, and many clubs, sports and extracurriculars are a must. He and Virgil have been buds since 4^th grade, but semi outcasts as smart and studious, which impacts their ability to score A+ hotties. Virgil’s slick cousin Han (Kang) is about the opposite, with girls focused on him and his dope wheels.

Ben knows he needs to improve his verbal SAT score by 60 points to get a perfect test grade, so he is picking new words daily (such as temerity), along with his usual chaotic studying regime. That being said, he can’t help but lose track of his studies while thinking about school hottie Stephanie Vandergosh (Cheung), but her boyfriend Steve Choe (Cho) and pal academic all-star Daric Loo have her attention.

The kids are all trying to pave their best futures and rain successes upon themselves, as well as the flood of hotties that comes with it. Buuuuut… then things start to get a bit crazy as the group of smart and well-performing individuals decide to look into all sorts of new ways of making cash using their brains as assets. Money starts flowing, but so does the trouble.

The story and script are pretty well realized, and it’s a fairly genuine film despite going to some dark criminal places. It is able to touch on many aspects of life, culture and adolescence. It is a nice little crime tale, and a dark high school story. The cast does a very good job, and it’s a quick watch. A low budget goes a long way in Better Luck Tomorrow.

Director Justin Lin “unofficially” reintroduced the character Han from this movie a few years later in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and a few of its subsequent sequels, with the same actor reprising the role.

Comparisons below only match up so-so, this is more unique than most, and more on the dark side than the comedy side.