Genius

Rod Daniel, 1999
Buzzfeed article ranking: 19

I'm skipping Ring of Endless Light and Phantom of the Megaplex.

Genius is a unique entry in the Disney Channel movie canon. It features a typical assortment of teenage cast members (including a young Emily Rossum), but it sets itself apart with its university setting. There are more adult characters in this movie than you find in most of its ilk, including Charles Fleischer of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? fame.

Charlie Boyle is a gifted teen. Since this is a kids' movie, that means that he has Nobel-Prize-level intellect coupled with a complete dearth of social skills. He loves the game of hockey, but his schoolmates don't want to let him in on the fun, because he's too weird. Fortunately, things are about to turn around for young Charlie, because he's just been offered a full scholarship to Northern University, a hockey powerhouse and academic home to Charlie's idol, physicist Dr. Krickstein.

So Charlie packs off to Northern. It isn't really clear whether he's a freshman or a grad student—considering he teaches an undergraduate physics course, I would guess the latter, but who knows. All things considered, I would say that at age 14 he's a step above Smart Guy but just below Doogie Howser, M.D. level.

Once he's enrolled, Charlie discovers that college isn't all it's cracked up to be. Dr. Krickstein's lab is underfunded (strange, since Krickstein is said to be on the verge of discovering a new subatomic particle), and the frat boys Charlie lives with don't like having a little kid in their midst. Yes, that's right, the university has placed a 14-year-old kid into a dorm suite with two adult college students, apparently without discussing the arrangement with any of them. (The frat boys are also clearly in their 30s, but that's neither here nor there.)

Charlie decides that the solution to all his problems is to take off his glasses, comb his hair back, put on a leather jacket, and start leading a double life as Chaz Anthony, local eighth-grader. When he's not in the particle physics lab with Roger Rabbit, he spends his time playing technically sophisticated pranks on his biology teacher and trying to impress Claire, his middle-school dream girl. He even convinces Claire he's an idiot so that she will tutor him.

Of course, the inevitable happens, and Charlie's two personas collide when Claire's father, the Northern hockey coach, recognizes "Chaz." Meanwhile, Charlie causes some kind of particle meltdown in the lab, which also destroys the hockey arena. It's pretty serious. (We're told the lab is located below the hockey rink because the ice helps keep the lab equipment cool. I'm pretty sure ice hockey rinks do not work that way.)

The only way for Charlie to save the day, win back his middle school friends, and help the hockey team recover from defeat, is to hi-jack some of Dr. Krickstein's newly-discovered graviton particles. The particles are quantum-entangled, you see, which means they can cause the opposing hockey players to trip over their own skates and slow-dance with one another. You might have thought the officials would call interference when the players begin levitating 10 feet off the ice, but apparently this is the Angels in the Outfield school of sports refereeing. Anyway, Northern wins the game, and everyone likes Charlie again.

Clearly, this is the cream of the crop for Disney Channel movies. It has no business being at number 19. The thought of ranking something as genius as Genius lower than such mediocre entries as Stepsister from Planet Weird is insulting.