Main cast: Luke Wilson (Mitch), Will Ferrell (Frank the Tank), Vince Vaughn (Beanie), Jeremy Piven (Pritchard), Ellen Pompeo (Nicole), Juliette Lewis (Heidi), Leah Remini (Lara), Craig Kilborn (Mark), Perrey Reeves (Marissa), Elisha Cuthbert (Darcie), and Seann William Scott (Peppers)
Director: Todd Phillips
It must be a gender thing. Some guys won’t stop laughing throughout this movie, while I can’t wait for this tedious, unfunny movie about overgrown mentally-unstable morons – males, naturally – to be over.
Old School is about three men who form a fraternity at the college that is going to possess their house, much to the dean Pritchard’s disgust. The ever dull and uncharismatic Luke Wilson plays Mitch, a man whose tendency to just stare ahead in a blank manner rightfully drives his wife Heidi into holding gangbangs at home when he’s away. He stumbles upon her and some guys just about to start the orgy one day, and he’s then embarked on what seems like a permanent distant blank stare all the way to the end of the movie. Will Farrell plays Frank who has just married but is starting to worry that he will have to just restrict himself to the same vagina for the rest of his life. Has Frank looked into the mirror lately? He should be lucky he’s getting a real live vagina waiting for him at home, that moron. Beanie, played by Vince Vaughn who looks more repulsive each time I see him, is the married but tacky man who masterminds the nude wrestling parties for the fraternity. Mitch finds a nice woman but oops, in a drunken haze he slept with the underage girl who turns out to be the daughter of his employer.
Naturally, the men are all ugly or dull freak. This movie caters shamelessly to the male ego, but it also lulls the male audience into a false sense of security before springing the fox trap onto their testicles: in the end, the men may break things and do other stupid things males do in some machismo-triggered dumb mechanism thing, but they slink back to their women, tails between their legs, repentant and timid, by the time the movie credits roll.
There is a cute homage to The Graduate involving a tranquilizer dart that I laugh out loud to, but that’s it. I recognize that there is intelligence at work behind even the most inane scenes, because there are several other scenes that are gentle but playful homages to other more sober coming-of-age movies that come before it. The thing is, I find it more absurd than funny watching men in their mid-thirties trying their most pathetic best to reenact their teenage years. I like Jeremy Piven though and I think it’s a shame nobody puts this man in the main role more often.
