**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Jeremy Piven, Craig Kilborn, Elisha Cuthbert, and Terry O’Quinn
Directed by Todd Phillips & written by Court Crandall, Todd Phillips, and Scot Armstrong
2003
92 min R
“Old School” is another one of those middling comedies that’s more like a series of “Saturday Night Live” sketches thrown together around the same characters and locations than a real movie. Did movies like this, whose lineage includes “Spies Like Us,” exist before 1980? Often they’re populated by “SNL” veterans—Adam Sandler lately—brief appearances by talk show hosts and stand-up comics, and walk-on cameos by regulars in other gross-out comedies like “Dude Where’s My Car?” They have no real substance to work with, no point, and scenes could go in virtually any order. Instead of personalities, male characters have only a handful of traits that can be altered for the need of any given scene. Females are unfunny, forgettable, cast by looks alone, have less to work with than their male counterparts, and exist only to tell the boys when they’re doing well and when they’ve screwed up. And take their clothes off. That movies like “Old School” do not contain a shred of realism is not to their discredit, but that their level of the surreal is as malleable as their characters is.
Comedies like these can only be rated on a scale of how many of their individual scenes are funny, which rarely breaks the 50% mark. We can rate them by nothing else because there is no one believable enough to care about and no genuine suspense or tension. On those grounds alone, because “Old School” and its ilk are not real movies, I could refuse them anything higher than two-and-a-half stars. Odds are individual scenes could be played weekly on “Saturday Night Live” or “Mad TV” with a twenty-second intro and elicit just as many, if not more laughs. So we’re not talking “Dr. Strangelove” here.
Yet “Old School” contains Will Ferrell. Usually the presence of Ferrell elicits from me a generous helping of “who the hell cares?” He’s good on “Saturday Night Live,” as Robert Goulet and as that professor who’s always talking about “night is the time for lovers!” Not that I’d like to see feature films built around either of them. Like Adam Sandler, who wastes most of his time toiling in formula comedies just like I described above, there’s an appeal to Ferrell’s onscreen persona. Both men are the embodiment of some part of our psyche that the superego usually keeps in check. Not only do they say what we would say if we didn’t dread the consequences, but they yell them at the tops of their lungs. They break things and hit people that we’re tempted to break and hit. “Punch-Drunk Love” takes Sandler seriously and was one of the best movies of 2002. Ferrell needs a movie like that. Rumor has it he’s slated to play Ignatius Riley in David Gordon Green’s (“All the Real Girls”) adaptation of “A Confederacy of Dunces.” We’ll see. “Old School” isn’t a movie that takes him seriously, but there he is.
Anyway, Ferrell’s unbridled id in “Old School” is a man disillusioned with life in his thirties who longs to return to his college days. He wants floozy twenty-year-old girls, he wants to drink himself into a stupor, and he wants to run naked across campus. He wants to sleep in late and do nothing all day and stay up all night. In ways that “Old School” takes waaaay too long to explain, he and two of his grown-up friends (Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn, talented actors mostly squandered here) start a fraternity at Made-Up Movie University. Ferrell also has his new wife to deal with, and he alternates between screaming intensity and a soft-spoken man-child. As his relationship with his wife plummets out of control, he becomes a hulking mass of self-pity and self-loathing, and the movie’s best scenes belong to him exploding or humiliating himself. We all have those days when something goes wrong and then we take it out on the wrong people; watch Ferrell blow up on his fraternity pledges because his wife has crossed him. The bit where he gets shot with a tranquilizer dart and ruins a child’s birthday party, leading to a “Graduate” homage, is priceless.
“Old School’s” supposed lead is actually Luke Wilson’s character, who is bland and vaguely likable, mostly because we remember Wilson being likable in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Legally Blonde,” and “Bottle Rocket.” He unwittingly becomes the leader of the fraternity, which quickly and inexplicably evolves a “Fight Club”-esque devotion. Like Ferrell, his best scenes are when he is self-pitying and angry—his girlfriend betrays him—and then he gets into a tedious romance and gets all the tedious plot points in the first and third acts rolling. “Old School” is also packed with casual misogyny, in which Women Plural, one after another, are a lot of fun, but Woman Singular is judgmental, wrong-headed, and always mother-nagging the boys to not have so much fun.
About 60% of “Old School’s” cheap jokes about sex, beer, abused genitalia, and Will Ferrell’s hatred of himself are funny. Two-and-a-half stars. If jokes about beer, battered genitals, and drunken selfish pigs acting impulsively don’t make you laugh, then don’t see it. I wouldn’t see it twice and I probably wouldn’t have seen it the first time if my wife and I weren’t at a friend’s house, perusing his DVD collection. My darling picked “Old School” and later she explained why. “I wanted to see some silly crap,” she said. Then she looked at me accusingly and added: “I need a break between ‘Cries and Whispers’ and ‘The Rules of the Game.’” Fair enough. Woman Singular is always trying to keep me down.
Finished June 11th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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