A mature, intelligent high school student has a side job arranging “accidental” deaths (no 2 alike) of fellow students’ parents. A cop detective notices this student being connected to all the kids of dead parents. Who wins the face-off?

While being in high school, many students try to enroll in different activities and school clubs that will help them obtain additional credits and a better track record when applying for the colleges of their choice. But, for Reagan Collins (Colin Ford), after-school activities may not be good enough to meet his moral needs, and probably the economic ones.

In Extracurricular Activities (2019), we meet an out-of-the-ordinary overachiever straight-A 17-year-old high school student that is, as any other regular teenager at that age, a master at pretending to be someone else. He’s polite, educated, and has a moral code. Unfortunately, all this is a facade to avoid that his true natural self, a teenager who uses his intelligence to premeditated murder the parents of rich and dissatisfied adolescents, comes to light. By the way, did I mention that he’s smart? Reagan is so smart that he manages to hide his tracks to make the homicides look like ordinary accidents.

As I mentioned before, Reagan has a moral compass; he’s not a hit man. Very much like the main character in the TV series Dexter, Reagan is self-governed by a personal code in which he mentions that he only considers the job when the parents are neglecting, bad influences, hypocritical and do not perform a good for the world.

After all, even if Reagan is very careful calculating plans that’ll leave no trace, there is a detective ready to track every move he makes. As soon as Detective Cliff Dawkins (Timothy Simons) jumps on the case, he starts connecting the dots and begins to try to collect evidence to drop the weight of justice on Reagan’s actions. However, it’s very hard for others to believe in the word of the detective since Reagan has left a mark on every grownup that interacts with him due to his sweet and innocent external personality.

Extracurricular Activities is the kind of film you cannot demand good actors, excellent dialogue or great sets because it’s a great satire. It’s a very entertaining and clever movie, with a bit of sarcasm to help build the main joke: killing parents just because they are mean. It is a metaphor for teenage angst and their intolerance towards their parents during a stage filled with hysteria and confusion.

It is evident that the film struggles to define its genre. It goes from black comedy to thriller, then back to a simple comedy and later to a romantic comedy. It’s not a factor to worry about considering you’ll be entertained with every mischief action on the film.

Every character in the film has a unique and single quirk that identifies them so well through the whole film. It does seem to fill profile stereotypes, which works perfectly well for the plot: killing evil and dishonest parents. But when it comes to the detective, it does make you question how he came so quickly to a conclusion; the film wasn’t even halfway on time when the high school student became the main suspect.

Even though Extracurricular Activities does not seem to be a dark comedy or a slasher film, it can be appreciated as a satire that will keep you intrigued until the end: you will keep the question alive whether it will be discovered or not.