Chris is the top brain who just wants to party, Mitch is the 15-year-old college wiz kid. Supposedly hard at work on a lab project with a mysterious deadline, they still find time to use their genius to discover new ways to have fun.
What lifts the production above the run-of-the-mill is swift direction by Martha Coolidge, who has a firm grasp over the manic material.
– ,
Variety,
30 May 2007
fresh:
Real Genius contains many pleasures, but one of the best is its conviction that the American campus contains life as we know it.
– Roger Ebert,
Chicago Sun-Times,
1 Jan 2000
rotten:
What the film needs, instead of these familiar teen-movie trappings, is a cleverness and eccentricity to match that of its characters. For the most part, these are qualities that it lacks.
– Janet Maslin,
New York Times,
20 May 2003
fresh:
It does make you wonder if the drive of the US education system is ultimately to develop better weapons of mass-destruction, though Coolidge's movie is too hazily good-natured to capitalise on the tougher aspects of the material.
– Geoff Andrew,
Time Out,
24 Jun 2006
rotten:
The humor is relentlessly cruel, smug, and disconnected from any sense of how human beings might behave in similar situations.