Posted: 09/26/2006

School for Scoundrels

(2006)

by Aaron Riccio

Todd Phillips has sure come a long way since Road Trip.

No. Wait. No, he hasn’t.

His latest, School for Scoundrels is a straightforward revenge comedy that lacks the charm of Starsky & Hutch’s unadulterated chemistry and Old School’s irrepressible spunk. Like Benchwarmers before it, Jon Heder rises up for the nerds of the world…but honestly, is there anybody who isn’t sick of this kid yet? To the film’s credit, it makes the supporting cast of hacks like Horatio Sanz look great, but the few talents actually in the movie (like David Cross and Sarah Silverman) are stuck playing shades of themselves. Only Billy Bob Thornton, as the self-professed “doctor” winds up looking good (unlike Michael Clarke Duncan, who must just be desperate for cash). Suave and with a real fire in his eyes, Thornton brings out shades of both Steve Martin and Michael Caine in that other Scoundrel movie, which, considering he’s the only life to this film, is almost a prerequisite.

What’s worst about this film is that the moral states that you have to sacrifice who you are in order to make other people like you. Rather than Heder discovering that he’s been a good enough person all along, in order to get the girl, he has to become just as wily as Thornton, just as filled with lies and pretension. Granted, this is a School for Scoundrels, but—class dismissed.

Of course, there are plenty of other things to pick on. Although Todd Phillips’ opening scene demonstrates an eye for detail, he chooses to focus on being crude. There’s a recurring joke about how Thornton’s bodyguard (Duncan) rapes the students. Also, the attempt to gain cheap laughs fosters many negative stereotypes: Heder’s character, a traffic cop, is mugged by two black men. When he confronts them later on as part of his homework, he’s saved from the mother of all ass-whuppings by the mother of all stereotypes: their big, angry, black mama. For some reason, both Heder and Thornton have to be shot in the crotch (albeit by different things), and, because a film must crescendo to a climax, one scene delivers 18,000 volts to the crotch. At least the friends of Jackass weren’t working from a script.

This is not to say—after all that negativity—that you won’t laugh. The greatest tragedy of bad comedies is that you will, and if this is the only kind of film you ever watch, that’s fine. But if not, it’ll be like realizing one day, years from now, that you’ve never orgasmed: your whole life has passed you by. But hey, if that’s what you’re into: School for Scoundrels delivers potty humor (swirlees and all) and nothing butt.

Aaron Riccio is a theatre critic and film reviewer living in New York.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com