The Perfect Score starts off with a fairly promising premise - a group of slackers and outsiders ban together to attempt to fudge their way past the culturally biased standardized testing of one of life's most stressful exams - the SAT. The problem with a premise like this is that you have to ask the audience to side with plain old dishonesty and cheating. Which isn't an easy feat unless there's a higher moral purpose that you can bring into play.

The Perfect Score, unfortunately has no higher moral trump card to play and thus is doomed from the outset. Sure the history of film-making is rife with villains that audiences root for, from Butch and Sundance to the Birdman of Alcatraz, but films such as this offer us mitigating circumstances that charm us into siding with the bad guys. But to root for a group of high school students to steal the answers to the SAT's just because they've been out in the parking lot rolling joints, etc is where The Perfect Score's grade starts to suffer.

The real loser in the Perfect Score is Scarlett Johansson, it's unfortunate for her that this misstep of a career move had to be released after her truly remarkable turns in both Lost In Translation and Girl With The Pearl Earring.

Just by going from memory, this is by far the worst film she's been involved with and her performance does nothing to make matters any better. Her character is pretty much the bad-girl daughter of an executive in the Educational Testing Service who writes the SAT. And wouldn't you know the facility is just down the street from the High School. As you might have guessed by now Scarlett throws in with this group of criminal under-achievers and a plot is hatched to hijack the answers in a caper that's made out to be more daring than the things Tom Cruise did in either Mission Impossible

The narrator of the film is a dope smoking wise acre played by Leonardo Nam and he fills the dead air of this film with stoner platitudes like, "And so the day arrived. We had picked it, rolled it, smoked it - and now it was time to ride with the buzz. By now I'm confident that you can see how this might be a very difficult film to get behind unless you were a 17 year old stoner flunkie. Even more telling is that Nam is far and away the most entertaining character in the film and though, he does his best with what he's given here, he is definitely talented and I'm sure he'll land on his feet down the road sometime soon.

Also along for this misbegotten ride is the talented actress Erika Christensen (Traffic) who, like Johansson should have taken a better look at this script before they inked the deal. Her character adds nothing to her body of work, and her part could have just as easily been played by a lesser known actress whose career wouldn't have been as damaged by having anything to do with this dumb and dumber debacle. On the basis that I love Scarlett and Nam showed a good bit of promise I'm going to give it a D just for the flunk of it.