Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How To Date Billy Walsh’ on Prime Video, A Teen Rom-Com That’s Trying To Do Too Much

Prime Video‘s new rom-com How To Date Billy Walsh has a simple enough premise: A nerdy guy who is in love with his best friend wants to find a way to ask her to the big graduation dance and profess his love to her. Or wait, maybe the premise is, a nerdy girl falls in love with the hot new student , to her best friend’s chagrin, and has to find a way to get him to notice her. Or maybe it’s actually about a nerdy guy pretending to be someone he’s not to trick his best friend into acting like an idiot in front of the hot new guy she likes. That’s the problem with How To Date Billy Walsh – it’s an ode to teen rom-coms that ends up trying to be too many movies in one.

HOW TO DATE BILLY WALSH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “All is fair in love and war. Fact,” the screen reads, and then we see a teenage boy racing up the steps of his posh-looking high school. Despite the fact that he’s in a suit, he’s totally disheveled, dirty, and has the words “Archie’s Bald” scribbled across his forehead in black marker, and you can see that a chunk of his head has been shaved. Inside the school, the June Ball is taking place, it’s a formal graduation dance where his classmates are all celebrating the end of school. He charges toward the stage where a band is performing and gets tackled by security.

The Gist: The teenage boy is our narrator, Archie Arnold (Sebastian Croft), and thankfully, he backs up the story so we can understand how he got himself into whatever mess he’s in. Archie has been best friends with Amelia Brown (Charithra Chandran) basically since birth. Born in the same hospital and switched at birth (a goofy joke that sets the silly tone of the movie, because they’re difference races and sexes), their parents became best friends and then, by extension, they did too. The thing is, Archie’s always been in love with Amelia (a.k.a. Millie) and she has no idea.

After watching this brief flashback of their childhood years, we flash forward to six weeks before the June Ball, and Archie’s been working up the courage to tell Millie how he feels about her and ask her to the dance. But when a new American student who appears to have just watched Top Gun rolls into school on a motorcycle (leather jacket, Ray Bans, NO HELMET), Millie is all, WHO IS HE?

He is Billy Walsh (Tanner Buchanan, who played Robbie Keene on Cobra Kai), and he instantly becomes the object of everyone’s obsession. Archie and Amelia are dorks, and Billy and his swishy hair are basically the coolest, so what’s a girl to do to get him to fall in love with her? When Millie learns that Archie’s parents (played to the horniest, campiest degree by Lucy Punch and Tim Downie) used a Love Doctor to fall back in love with one another after hitting a rocky patch, she seeks out the Love Doctor herself to help Billy fall in love with her.

This is where the film takes a weird turn, because Archie, using an app that ages your appearance, pretends to be the Love Doctor, and he offers Millie really bad love advice via FaceTime, telling her to change her appearance and be mean to Billy to get him to like her. While it initially works and Billy asks her out, she treats him like garbage and he dumps her almost immediately. She makes it up to him with a big, public gesture, he forgives her, and they date, but soon Millie realizes it was Archie she loved the whole time. As soon as she makes this declaration to him, the words he’s been longing to hear and on the night of the ball no less, she finds out that Archie was deceiving her by posing as the Love Doctor and she is rightfully pissed. She runs off to the ball, Archie chases her and gets ambushed on his way there and tied to a goalpost by some popular jocks, and ultimately it’s Billy who helps Archie down. And that’s brings us back to the where the beginning of the film, as Archie arrives to the ball, fighting his way through a choreographed dance number that the whole student body was doing (!?) and rushing the stage so he can declare his love to Millie.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The British high school setting and the students’ obsession with sex is very Sex Education, but there’s also a fantasy element similar to Jane The Virgin, that allows us to hear the character’s inner monologues and see their thoughts, usually for a punchline.

Our Take: Rarely am I this stumped by what a movie is supposed to be and how I’m supposed to feel about it. On the one hand, it works pretty well as an ode to classic love triangles with shades of Pretty In Pink (will our kind of nerdy girl choose the cool, hot guy or her equally nerdy BFF?), on the other it’s a fantasy romance; the teens live in steampunk and Hobbit-inspired houses in the English countryside and the film is flecked with silly, outlandish sequences and fourth-wall breaking. It’s also a farce full of deception and trickery and, eventually, forgiveness. But it’s not really doing any one of those things very well. (But also, can someone please tell me how a dance number factors into any of the above?)

More confusing is the fact that there are some really great comedic actors like Nick Frost, Guz Khan, and Tim Downie who are given next to nothing to do for the whole film. The titular Billy Walsh is also barely a character; Buchanan broods and looks nice on top of his motorcycle, but he speaks roughly one paragraph in the whole film, a brief monologue where he explains to Millie that every likes him but no one cares about getting to know him, and that’s how you know he’s not a prick but a nice guy. That’s the only character development Billy gets, and the rest of the supporting cast are even more one-dimensional. It’s especially weird that in the end, everyone, including all the bitchy popular girls and the toxic bro jocks, softens up and turns sympathetic when Archie professes his love to Millie in the final scene. I don’t mind being challenged by movies (The Lighthouse???) but it’s rare for me to leave a teen rom-com this confused by the choices that were made. I think someone wanted this to be a meta ode to teen movies past, but I also think someone threw a plate of spaghetti-shaped cliches against a wall and everything stuck.

Sex and Skin: You can hear Archie’s parents having sex off-camera in one scene, and there is plenty of blue humor (references to dicks, panty-sniffing, dildos and the like) throughout the movie.

Parting Shot: The headmaster of the school sits on a toilet in a school bathroom stall on his phone. It rings twice and when the line engages he asks, “Hello, is this the Love Doctor?” I guess that’s supposed to be a funny button, but it falls flat.

Performance Worth Watching: Charithra Chandran is the star of the movie, despite sharing top billing with Sebastian Croft. Even though the film doesn’t seem to know how realistic it wants to be, she’s game for anything, whether it’s scenes requiring genuine emotion or completely absurdity.

Memorable Dialogue: “Go get her,” Billy serenely tells Archie, after realizing that he and Millie are meant to be together.

Our Call: SKIP IT. I really wish I liked this film more because the impressive cast was squandered on material that was trying to do too many things all at once.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.