Stealing Harvard Doesn't Make the Grade

I feared going back into a movie theater to see another Tom Green comedy like car-accident survivors fear returning to crash sites. Freddy Got Fingered was one of the worst movie experiences of my entire life. Not as bad as the time I got strong-armed into seeing Vanilla Ice's big-screen debut in Cool as Ice. But bad, bad, bad nonetheless.

So it was with great dread that I found myself in a theater Monday night waiting for Stealing Harvard to start. I kept saying to myself, "This movie also stars Jason Lee. Jason Lee is cool. Remember Road Trip. You liked Tom Green in Road Trip. You WILL get through this."

And you know what? It wasn't so bad! Oh, don't get me wrong. The movie still stinks like yesterday's diapers. Anyone who tells you that it's slap-nuts funny hasn't had their nuts slapped in a while. Considering the premise, though, it could have been a LOT funnier. Considering the fact that it features Lee, Megan Mullally, Dennis Farina, and John C. Reilly, the film SHOULD have been a lot funnier. But it wasn't traumatizing the way Fingered was. I didn't want to drive out to Hollywood after seeing it and protest the studio that financed it and was responsible for its release. I didn't want to shake Drew Barrymore for ever lying down beside that terrible, terrible man.

Lee stars as John Plummer, a good-hearted medical equipment salesman who is one of the world's nicest guys. He and his fianci, Elaine, have saved up a long time to reach their goal of $30,000, which they intend to use as a down payment on a home before getting married. But John also looks after his niece, Noreen (Tammy Blanchard), and her trailer-trash mother (Mullally) who have no cash. John has always been a surrogate father to Noreen. Years earlier after Noreen had lost a big spelling bee on her first word ("tarp"), John made the ill-advised promise to the weeping little girl that if she ever got into college, he would pay for it. At the time, it seemed like a safe, sweet promise. I mean, jeez, the girl couldn't even spell "tarp" at age 11.

Well, guess what? Noreen blossomed in high school and got herself accepted to Harvard! Faced with a $30,000 tuition bill, John is faced with a dilemma. He can't disappoint Noreen. But he also can't disappoint Elaine, who gets teary-eyed even during sex. The rest of the movie follows John and his slacker buddy Duff's (Green) ridiculous attempts to steal the needed money to satisfy both women.

The ill-fated theft attempts should have provided the comic highlights of the movie. Directed by Bruce Murdoch, Stealing Harvard is smart to engage its audience emotionally early on for making Noreen so deserving of a chance at higher education. I also liked some of the fringe characters, such as the rifle-toting teenage cashier who uses one of John's botched robbery attempts as an opportunity to shoot up his own convenience store and steal porno mags. But the movie's main comic setpieces fall flat time after time. One involves stealing money from the mansion safe of a rich man, who has a fetish for catching burglars and making them dress up in women's clothes for his own sick jollies. Another attempt involves enlisting a local gangster (Chris Penn, slipping down yet another chair away from his brother, Sean, at the Thanksgiving table after one more terrible career choice).

Lee never really gets to cut loose and be his charming, dim-witted self that he plays so well in the various Kevin Smith movies. There is just nothing overly funny about John. His best moments are in his interactions with Dennis Farina, who stars as Elaine's disapproving father, and with Farina's equally disapproving dog. But this is something we have seen in countless sitcoms. Heck, Farina is even going to co-star in a sitcom this fall about a disapproving father whose newly married daughter and idiot son-in-law moves in with him. And it doesn't help that Ben Stiller went through these same motions in vastly two vastly funnier movies: Meet the Parents (the father-in-law from Hell) and There's Something About Mary (the little dog who likes to attack with zany repercussions).

And then we have Tom Green. At this point, Green is just annoying to look at it. He is a fad that is already over. The filmmakers obviously made the movie a year ago when his name still had some value. Now, you sit in a theater as Green dumps his stupid, limited bag of comic tricks on the table and the only thing you can marvel at is the long, sustained bouts of silence that grip those assembled. You start to watch the background extras in his scenes, because they are more interesting.

But I'll tell you what was funny, though. Sitting in front of me in the theater was a couple with a baby, who couldn't have been more than a few months old. Ordinarily, when a family of three sits in front or in back of me just before a movie starts, it's just demoralizing because you know it's only a matter of time before the wailing starts. Sure enough, the kid started crying about 45 minutes into the film. What was funny was how quick the mother volunteered, "I'll take him!" And she was gone, away from the boredom, away from the unfunny misfire Stealing Harvard.

Stealing Harvard is rated PG-13 for language, gross humor, and fully clothed sexual content.