Sidelined: The Qb and Me Fumbled on the Play
When I heard that TikTok star Noah Beck was making his acting debut in a Wattpad fanfiction adaptation titled The QB Bad Boy and Me, I knew I was in for a treat. I had been following this film since it was first announced and was genuinely interested in the outcome. I find Noah Beck charismatic and was hopeful his transition into film would be successful. Instead, what I got was a movie so packed with stereotypical high school romance tropes that it devolves into an unrecognizable, faceless abomination.
The movie follows Dallas Bryan, played by Sienna Agudong, an artistically inspired cheerleader with big dreams who just wants to escape her small town. Noah Beck plays the ridiculously named Drayton Francis Lahey, the star football quarterback who, surprise, surprise, doesn't want to follow in his father’s footsteps. It’s a movie about two people who have nothing and everything in common, who supposedly hate yet love each other, and who are ultimately brought together purely by their horniness.
Sidelined tries to be too many movies at once and fails at all of them. Drayton is supposedly a bad boy who rides a motorcycle but won’t drink the night before a game. He’s a bad boy who lives in a multimillion-dollar prefab mansion but doesn’t throw parties there. He’s the bad boy who doesn’t kiss on the first date, yet he’s bad enough to not give Dallas the bed when she sleeps over. At no point in this film did I feel that any of the characters experienced a change or had an emotional arc. It’s astonishing how someone can make a movie where supposedly life-changing events happen to the two main characters, yet they remain exactly the same at the end as they were at the beginning.
Beyond the bad styling, poor lighting, and horrendous script, what’s most distasteful about this movie is its complete lack of fun. In fact, it’s offensively boring. I had ground-level expectations going into this film, yet it somehow still managed to leave me feeling disappointed. What this film makes abundantly clear is that the heyday of high school romance films like 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s All That is dead and gone. My one consolation is that I watched this movie for free on Tubi.