Revenge of the high-school nerds.

The premise OF 2004's inaugural "down with it" teen flick, The Perfect Score, is so obviously ripe it boggles the mind that no one has exploited it yet: A band of students gets together to steal the SAT answers because as the movie lets us know, the SAT is a brutal example of The Man's oppression, and as the Asian stoner- voice-over narrator says, the SAT stands for "Suck-Ass Test." (Whoa. "Suck-ass." This movie definitely has its finger on the pulse of today's youth-in-crisis!)

The movie's premise, and the casting of scoliosis-babe Scarlett Johansson, are the film's two plusses, which are two plusses more than most movies that make it to your local multiplex. In many ways, this poorly scripted, poorly directed and poorly acted movie's heart is in the right place: The Perfect Score is pro-theft, pro-drugs and pro-slut in a heartwarming way, even if it gets squeamish in the end and backs away with a Brady Bunch ending.

So there you have it: The Perfect Score is not very good, but relevant.

Case-in-point: My former high school, Saratoga High?an evil, hellish place in a typical suburban California way. And now, the focus of a local scandal. Its bad name has been getting smeared all over the San Francisco Bay Area media lately due to?yup, you guessed it?a student cheating ring. It turns out that students in AP honors classes had been stealing tests from their teachers, while another ring planted keystroke software and password code- breaking tools in the teachers' and administrators' computers and systems. The ring had been operating for months and was blown open by a student who narc'd. Once the cheating scandal blew open, the school administration cracked down hard, and this caused the whole high school pressure cooker to explode.

To give you an idea about how unimaginative and tame The Perfect Score is compared to Saratoga High, just contrast the plot lines of art to reality.

The Perfect Score (art): Ring of diverse students (goth girl, valedictorian, black basketball player, Asian pot-smoker, nice-guy Jew and proto-yuppie Handsome Guy) conspire to steal SAT questions in advance of the test, succeed in their edge-of-your-seat heist, but in the end refuse to cheat because they've all learned an important lesson in life.

Saratoga High (reality): A group of homogenous students (Asian-American) conspire to steal tests in order to get ahead in an increasingly cutthroat environment that values only test score results. When the ring is exposed, the school administration launches a witch-hunt, forcing students to squeal and confess and turn on each other, which they do with reckless abandon, taking both innocent and guilty down with them. Eventually, one accused student who faces "zero-tolerance" expulsion breaks into the school's chemistry lab, steals bomb-making materials, including potassium chlorate and glycine, gets busted by the sheriff's deputies and confesses that he planned to blow up the whole school. Later, his 15-year-old girlfriend is busted during internet surveillance threatening the lives of the school principal and his family.

Which movie would you rather see?

If you're like 99.99 percent of Americans, you'd rather see The Perfect Score, the sanitized, happy-ending version with the hot young white chicks (well, actually just one hot white chick?the other white chick, the valedictorian, is played by Erika Christensen, the butt-faced, midget-skulled Scientologist who played Michael Douglas' crack ho daughter in Traffic). You want to see the version with Scarlett Johansson wearing tight goth halters. Not the reality version at Saratoga High with last names like Chen and Kim, two quiet, respectful, personality-crushed, second-generation Asian-American students, and a callous, stressed, unforgiving school administration that foolishly pressures the students, then behaves even more hysterically when the pressure-inspired cheating ring is exposed. All that malice, stress and quiet ambition of the sort at my former high school, it just ain't cinematic.

I am here now in Saratoga, CA, doing a story on the winkie bomb plot for a local newspaper, and if there's one thing I've learned from the few scared, measured interviews that I've managed to arrange, it's this: People don't want to know the reality version. They don't even want to know what they know. And what's worse is that they don't want anyone else to know what they know either.

I know what you're thinking now: "So the movie's relevant, shitty, but better than miserable high school reality. Big whoop. What I, John Q. Movie-Going Public, really want to know is, how will The Perfect Score affect the War on Terror?"

Good question. I try to imagine some sullen 19-year-old Pakistani nerd, driven by the dream of blowing himself up in a spectacular fireball, skulking shamefully into a blasphemous Karachi movie theater to watch The Perfect Score. I would think that this movie might confuse his signals. Because the same people he hates?the horrible, shallow bourgeois parents?are the same people that the movie's heroes hate too. Second, the valedictorian is a virgin who turns into a slut at the end. This would really throw our Mohammed for a loop. Why kill yourself for the promise of ghost-virgin sluts when you can have a real, fleshy (albeit butt-faced) virgin slut like Erika Christensen in the here and now? And last, the racial Benetton makeup of the teen heroes?white, Jew, black, yellow?might make your Pak terrorist foolishly believe that there'd be a spot for him in allegedly multicultural America. Of course, multiculturalism is just one of the many pious lies we Americans like to tell ourselves, but even within this lie there are limits?no teen comedy gang would ever have a Pakistani, or any Muslim, in its gang. You and I know this, but would our potential Pak terrorist? Not likely.

Therefore, I'm going to say that if you showed The Perfect Score to a theater packed with sullen young Muslim extremist males in Karachi, I'd wager that a good 20 percent or more would be less inclined to carry out their nefarious deeds, while about five percent would be galvanized to move up the schedule of their martyrdom, if only out of anger for the sinful thoughts that Scarlett Johansson's bubble ass might inspire.

No review of this movie would be complete without lodging a complaint about the Asian stoner kid, who turns out to be the hero of this flick. He joins the ranks of PC Hollywood's cliche-inversions, like the tough-girl action hero or the African-American computer programming whiz. He is, of course, a perfect inversion of the asocial, industrious, drug-free Asian student nerd. Except that in this movie, when placed in front of a computer near the end of the movie, the Asian stoner springs to brain-nerd life, as if he's had a genetic awakening, making The Perfect Score the first movie I can think of that has it both ways with racial cliches. It's so offensive that it's actually impressive. Imagine if Die Hard's black computer hacker were placed in front of a liquor store near the end of the movie, and the first thing he does is stick the place up, shoot the Korean owners, steal all the forties he can get his hands on, then burn the place down. Come to think of it, that would be pretty fucking cool.