The protagonist of Bad Genius is Lynn, a student who attends a competitive school

because her father works there. There is a catch, though: the headmaster of the
school is charging him more than she should because of it, putting Lynn’s family
in a more dire financial situation. The driving force that kickstarts this story is that
Lynn’s friend asks her to help cheat on an exam, because Lynn is one of the top
students in the school, giving them (and the friend’s wealthy boyfriend) the idea to
start a cheating ring for financial profit.

And so they do so. But it all goes down when the top student at the school, Bank,
rats Lynn out to the headmaster. In turn, Lynn gets banned from applying to the
competitive scholarship that will allow her to study abroad for college, while she
also loses he scholarship to attend the school. Her father is disappointed, but lets it
slide. However, she is drawn back into the cheating ring by Pat, the girl’s
boyfriend, and they recruit Bank into their scheme after some thugs beat him up,
thus making him late to the exam that would get him a scholarship.

They then eye a a very important international exam in Australia, using time zone
differences to get the answers to students in Thailand, but Bank gets caught
halfway through the test while Lynn memorizes everything herself and sends it to
Thailand. She claims not to know Bank and gets to go home, but finds herself
forever traumatized by the events that went down in Australia. While her two
friends are able to go to competitive schools, her score was considered void
because she left the test room to send the answers, leaving her in a bad situation.

Bank, too, is forever changed as he was caught cheating and no longer be

applicable for anything. With the money from his end of the scheme, he upgrades
his mother’s business, but then tries to blackmail Lynn into continuing a life full of
crime and cheating. That’s when, at the end of the movie, she walks away from
everything and comes clean to the authorities.

What fascinates me about Bad Genius is that not only does it grip you and absorb
you into the world that it creates, but it also manages commentary on subtle class
dynamics. The boyfriend, Pat, is cheating but already wealthy. He uses his wealth
to beat up an innocent person (Bank) and force them further into the scheme his
girlfriend and he have created. While the girlfriend shows remorse when Lynn says
she does not want to be friends anymore, he does not seem to care one bit.

Lynn and Bank are the ones suffering the most from the consequences of this, and
they both are the ones shown as being the most financially needy. Dependent on
the scholarships that keep them in school, they are the top two students for their
abilities and grit to begin with, but because they fall into the game that the wealthy
are playing, they becomes victims. It’s almost a tale of exploitation, which is very
common in today’s society if it isn’t obvious already. In order to try and better
themselves financially, they turned to dishonest means, but only they paid the price
at the end of the day,