This story is a very true character study that I can attest to of the freedom that everyone grants you when you maintain a scholarly and overachieving front, maybe not as to the extremes of the murder as shown in this movie but still very real. This shows the lesser characterized side of intellect, how you use it when your bored and you realize you can outsmart everyone around you and expand into drugs, scams, etc. Operate with impunity and because your keeping grades and appearances up no one suspects a thing. I'm not saying its true for everyone but this movie is a very real look when your bored, stuck in suburbia , and decide to make the rash jump into more "interesting" pursuits and figure your smart enough to get away with.The film itself never leaves you bored even though its not flashy. The characters themselves are very believable and conceited in their own greatness. The story is well paced and shows the gradual progression into the dark underbelly when temptations meet brains that think they are beyond limitation. And despite what others try to slap on as a detractor to this film, race really doesn't have anything to do with it, its just the group of kids portrayed in the film. Their grades, immorality and decisions they make have nothing to do with race

I was compelled to borrow this from my library due to my crush on John Cho, aka Harold from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Anyhoo, I was so surprised at what a great, compelling movie it is. The actors are uniformly excellent. I was most drawn to the performances of Parry Shen and Jason Tobin, who play Ben and Virgil. Friends since childhood, they get drawn into a stylish and dark high school underworld of crime and violence.MTV Films has produced some interesting films, possibly one of the few companies that consistently releases original and surprising 'feels like independent' films.

Obviously the comments that you have probably read already are from a person (dilbertsuperman) who has never grown up in a heavily Asian populated community. If you visit these places such as the NoVa area you see that Asian kids really do form gangs and get away with crazy behavior you wouldn't believe since their parents have money and trust their overachieving children. To say that this movie is unbelievable just shows how extremely different the reality of these suburban cities is from our popular notion of what they /should/ be. While exaggerated in the typical Hollywood sense, it is not much beyond the scope of believability...as unbelievable as that may seem after watching this movie.When people say this movie has no plot, they really mean this movie has no linear predictable path with a climactic high point and typical wrap up resolution. It is in fact, absurd and unpredictable, which is why it is so powerful. Sorry, but reality doesn't always have an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and tidy resolution. Again, sorry if that is what you were expecting or wanted.

"Better Luck Tomorrow" is the story of a handful of smart high school kids who's book-smart appearances are not always as they seem. The main character is Ben, an over-achiever who consistently remarks that pretty much everything he is does is simply to gain recognition by college admissions officers and nothing more. That's a dumb outlook for a person to have right from the start.Ben "befriends" Daric, a fellow competitor who inducts Ben into his small gang of four, where they basically earn their time as petty thieves and other formulations of outlaws. Things soon blow way out of proportion, and, if you've seen one of these kinds of a movies, you've seen a million of them. You should know that someone always gets hurt (or worse) before any sort of moral redemption can occur (and here, there doesn't seem to be any).I wasn't impressed with this film for several reasons. First, is the fact that an Asian-American filmmaker and all Asian-American cast took it upon themselves to entirely portray themselves in the stereotypical frame of the Asian teenager--book-smart and rich. Though, we do see obvious influences of the American teenage stereotype in general, namely those characteristics that are claimed to be the products of Suburban boredom.The second part, too, concerns the moral ambiguity presented in the story, which tends to leave the viewer wondering exactly what the director had in mind about that he was supposed to tell us (if he did so at all) about the end of the film. As another viewer notes, too, there are certain characteristics here and there that persuade against any empathy for the main character (who appears either gutless or apathetic to the situations he becomes involved in), as well as anyone else. To paraphrase another viewer, these kids are both rich and smart (and I'll add to the mix, arrogant), so why should we feel sorry for them when they get into more trouble than they can handle? It's a hard arrangement of characters that don't seem to mesh well with the story at hand (although, the concluding ambiguity makes even this complicated)."Better Luck Tomorrow" is actually entertaining to a point. Fleshing out the stereotypes and the inconsistencies of characters and finales, may still leave something left worth valuing.