"Always follow your heart"
THR has recently watched How to Date Billy Walsh on Prime Video. How to Date Billy Walsh centres on lifelong best friends Archie (Sebastian Croft) and Amelia (Charithra Chandran) as they are about to finish school. Archie frequently breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience, confessing that he has always been too afraid to tell Amelia that he loves her and is planning on finally doing it. However, his plans are complicated by the arrival of new American heartthrob student Billy Walsh (Tanner Buchanan), who Amelia instantly falls for.
This film felt (mostly) like the epitome of a game of two halves. In the first half, opportunities to develop the characters' likeability, realistic feelings and emotions were continuously missed (‘emotional connection’ is something I may refer to a lot in various guises). However, it felt as if the second half was written at a last-gasp pace, like the writers noticed their mistakes and started to delve into things that they should have done from the very beginning.
Archie’s character is initially presented as a nerdy, quirky outsider. This is a cliché type of role, but I was initially impressed with the way those stereotypes were broken by him engaging in banter with fellow students, culminating in him slamming his American football in their stomachs in scenes reserved (at least in opening sequences) for frightening bullies and more masculine male characters. However, given his wealthy background and societal status, it can be hard to relate to rich kids with trust funds as Archie is. While humour in the absurdity of upper class people is something that can be done very effectively (Saltburn being a brilliant recent example), it fails to land as consistently here because unlike in Saltburn, there is no balance between the extreme humour and an emotional hook involving the protagonist.
Safe to say, the film has familiar relatable themes on unrequited love, never having a teenage romance, as well as crushes and love rivals feeling out-of-your-league. However, I struggled to root for the characters because their feelings for their respective crushes are explained too quickly, so therefore felt cliché and rushed. With Amelia, her fawning over someone and falling in “love” within ten hours while not speaking to them (as Amelia claimed she did with Billy Walsh) was stereotypical and tired. With Archie, it may have been better if the story leaned more on emotion to explain his feelings for Millie (rather than a haphazard summary of clips from their childhood). Those childhood clips were narrated as if the character himself was getting impatient, desperately wanting to just cut to the chase.
Much of the opening and first half of the film was also not helped by the constant use of gross-out humour of farting, toiletry functions and disgusting food. Not only is this repetitive, annoying, and unnecessary, but told us nothing about what actually motivates the characters and their personalities deep down.
Whenever I watch coming-of-age teenage films, it always gets me thinking about one of my all-time favourites, Perks of Being a Wallflower. That delivered a masterclass in the combination of humour, tragedy, and great structure; revealing how the anxious, traumatised yet loveable Charlie fell for high school crush Sam. How to Date Billy Walsh had the potential to do something similar with a common complication of falling in love with your best friend. However, it failed initially because it offered extraordinarily little by way of an emotional pull towards the characters.
One of the first moments that I found genuinely witty (if a little cliché) was when Archie stands up to Amber (who has been constantly bullying Amelia), declaring that “if you were on life support, I’d unplug you to charge my third phone.” This gutsy, no-holes-barred statement revealed how much Archie cares for Amelia, and the extreme lengths he would go to protect her.
However, this extremity casts Archie in an extremely bad light later when he manipulates Amelia by pretending to be an online love doctor. He tries desperately to force Amelia and Billy Walsh apart by giving her rogue dating advice, including a particularly cruel theory that men like women who are mean to them on their first date. This turns him into someone I felt was unlikeable, selfish, and undeserving of a best friend like Amelia. We also see a lot more of Amelia’s character flaws here: Her sadness of never being kissed throughout her school years is something many teenagers struggle with. However, for someone who seems more intelligent and level-headed than Archie, I found it hard to believe that even among her teenage angst she could be fooled by the “love-coaches” advice that being horrible to Billie Walsh on their first date was somehow bound to make him head-over-heels in love with her.
This then leads on to a crucial positive turning point as the second half began. Amelia tries to make it up to Billy by opening up to him on the school intercom about painful family tragedies she suffered as a teenager, alongside the many insecurities that have plagued her ever since. Her raw emotion was portrayed brilliantly by Charithra Chandran as she slowly peeled away the mask that had been up throughout the film. This was also a crucial and great coming-of-age moment for Archie, who finally admitted his mistakes and realised that “If you love someone, you have to set them free.”
My favourite scene of the whole film was Amelia having a flashback with her mother before she passed away just before going to her prom. Her mother's advice to “always follow your heart” was delivered with incredibly poignant music. In a way, this made me both delighted and disappointed at the same time. I was thrilled that we finally got brilliant emotional depth combined with an incredibly powerful scene. However, I was also baffled as to why the writers waited this long to deliver it, given this scene proved they were capable of doing it incredibly well. I suppose it was better late than never though, and it did play a crucial role in the ending of the film, which did produce a great mixture of laughter, emotion, and triumph for both main characters.
While there were many aspects of the film which could have been written a lot better, I do believe the various 1-star reviews were a bit harsh. The actors play their roles very well, and the quality of the writing and storytelling did improve as the film went on.
It is also refreshing to see a queer actor in Sebastian Croft being able to play a straight character. There is so much debate around gay actors playing gay characters, that gay actors having the chance to play straight roles is something that can sometimes be overlooked. Croft played his role convincingly; it is just a shame that he and the other actors were let down through so much of the writing at the start.
I would dread to think what mark I would give the film if it had stopped somewhere halfway through, but the increased emotional depth and raised stakes certainly gave the film a much-needed gallop to the finish line.
Congratulations, cast and crew!
Hidden Fire stars 5/10 ⭐️
Review written by Nathan Mann.
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