Rating- * (1/5)
If you have ever read one of my reviews for a bad movie, you know that I usually reserve the one-star rating for those movies that are not just bad but painfully, hatefully bad. At first glance, Stealing Harvard is not one of those movies that is so bad it angers me, it just falls flat. But the more I think about it, the more I do begin to get angry about this movie. The plot basically centers around a young salesman (Jason Lee) who is just getting enough money together to buy a home for him and his fiancé when his trailer park niece gets accepted to Harvard. This is a problem because she has a videotaped promise from Lee that he will pay for her college tuition, which in this case is exactly the same amount that he needs for his house. To resolve the problem, Lee goes to his best friend Duff, played by the over-the-top Tom Green, who devises a plan to steal the money from a rich neighbor. After that flops, they go to an old high school buddy who has become a gangster (played by Chris Penn in a sort of parody of his role in Reservoir Dogs) to try and get in on a bank robbery. After these and several other lame ideas fail, Lee finally goes to his fiancé who tells him to steal the money from her psychotically protective father, who also happens to be Lee’s boss. The result is a final heist scene that somehow thinks it is being outrageously funny although I didn’t hear a single laugh in my theater. Ultimately, this movie fails from the get-go not because of a lack of talent on anyone’s part in the actual production; Jason Lee is an intelligent leading man, Green, while over the top, has a great sense of physical comedy and comic timing, and the director, Kids In The Hall alumni Bruce McCullough, handles the material in the best way he can. The root of the problem here is the writing; it has all the trappings of a bad script including bad dialogue, a plot that eventually fades out of focus, and jokes that are so ill-conceived that they can’t help but fall flat. This is more than just a bad movie; it doesn’t even try to be good. It follows a formula, which is never good, but it doesn’t even execute the formula well. The more I think about it, the more this film makes me angry. Not the grossness or over-the-line humor or even bad taste…just the fact that it’s a comedy that’s not funny. I am so completely disturbed by the fact this script was read (probably several times!) by someone high up at Revolution Studios who actually thought, “Yeah, this would make a good movie.” This movie was made with money that could have been much better spent on…hell, anything other than Stealing Harvard. This film makes me angry because it represents the ever-present, although fortunately fading, prevalence of mediocre films still being made in Hollywood.