It's not enough for Accepted to make sloth and irresponsibility funny; the movie has to go and make them noble as well. And while I have no problem with slackers making me laugh, when they start preaching, that's when my ears close and my eyes roll.
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Long plays Bartleby Gaines, and if the filmmakers are intending some sort of Herman Melville reference, its placement in this puerile comedy is odd, to say the least. This Bartleby is a chronic underachiever, and proud of it, convinced that everything will turn out just fine in the end, because the world owes him a living - or, at the very least, a four-year college at which to continue vegetating. Of course, the world owes him no such thing. Hard as it may be for him to believe, four years of doing nothing in high school leaves him without a college to call home.
This horrifies Bartleby, but even worse, it horrifies his parents, who insist on telling him, "I told you so." Devastated by their attitude and depressed at having his bluff finally called, Bartleby ponders his next move and finds a surfeit of friends in similarly dire straits. There's top jock "Hands" (Columbus Short), whose injury short-circuited the football scholarship he was expecting; brainy Rory (Maria Thayer), who was so sure she'd get into Yale that she never applied anywhere else; and oddball Glen (newcomer Adam Herschman), who's just too weird for mass consumption.
Faced with such a predicament, what do these four despondent rejects do? Enroll in a community college, work hard and shoot for next year? Nope, not funny. Instead, they invent their own make-believe college - South Harmon Institute of Technology, whose acronym says it all (repeatedly, throughout the movie) - and con their parents into believing they've finally been accepted.
Trouble is, Bartleby's nerdy, overweight and brainy best friend, Sherman (Jonah Hill), does too good a job creating South Harmon's Web site, with its motto, "Acceptance is just a click away." Soon, several hundred intellectual and social misfits have found their way to the school, which Bartleby and his friends have hurriedly established at an abandoned mental hospital. Turns out these guys and gals have a lot of enthusiasm, mostly because they're amazed to find a college that wants them.
Accepted's best bits are visual, and most of them come via South Harmon's curriculum, a hodgepodge of courses such as "The Rise and Fall of Chevy Chase" and "Walking Around and Thinking About Stuff." There's also a lot of fun to be had with Silver Spring native Lewis Black as Sherman's Uncle Ben, an ultra-liberal, conspiracy-theorist blowhard who is recruited to serve as South Harmon's dean and becomes quite the on-campus hero for ravings against The Establishment.
Had the filmmakers stuck with such subversive comedy, they might have been on to something. But first-time director Steve Pink (who wrote Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity) and screenwriters Adam Cooper, Bill Collage and Mark Perez insist on going all sappy, filling the movie's second half with speeches about self-worth and trying to live up to parents' expectations. Trying to foist off Bartleby as a hero is simply impossible, and the treacly music that underscores his revelatory speech near the film's end (during a courtroom confrontation for which the Animal House creators should receive royalties) makes things downright insufferable.
>>>Accepted (Universal Pictures) Starring Justin Long, Jonah Hill, Lewis Black. Directed by Steve Pink. Rated PG-13. Time 92 minutes.
