Main cast: Jason Lee (John Plummer), Tom Green (Duff), Leslie Mann (Elaine Warner), Dennis Farina (Mr Warner), Megan Mullally (Patty), Richard Jenkins (Cook), John C McGinley (Detective Charles), and Tammy Blanchard (Noreen)
Director: Bruce McCulloch
Oh, Jason Lee, why? Why does he do this to himself? Stealing Harvard is a tedious ordeal of a movie. Tom Green must be the most unfunny funnyman ever to grace the big screen since Pauly Shore, and hopefully I don’t have to see his ugly mug again after this movie. He is not funny.
The script is also plain hokey, relying too much on slapstick antics to carry the show. When these antics fail to even amuse, the end result is a turkey stuffed with maggots, each maggot having Tom Green’s sorry ass name on its maggoty rear end.
This movie is about our nice guy, John Plummer. His life is swimming. He’s engaged to Elaine Warner, a nice gal whose tyrant father is his employer. They have saved $30,000 to buy a house, and life is okay… until his sister reminds him that he has pledged to pay for his niece Noreen’s Harvard education. The cost? Close to $30,000. Before John can do anything, Elaine has already used the money on the house. John has to get together with his friend, Duff, to plot ways to get that money. They will rob banks if they have to. And guess what? They really may just have to do that.
For too long, this movie fails to show me why John will go so far to please both girlfriend and niece. Elaine is savagely mocked – the running joke here is that she weeps like a wailing loon during sex – and there are tasteless suggestions of her being a bit too close to her father, so it is hard to see why she is worth the lies and trouble John has to concoct just to placate her. Only towards the last half hour does she finally come off as human, but by then it’s very hard to care anymore.
John and Duff’s botched robbery attempts are subdued and botched in their execution. I don’t even crack a smile. Stealing Harvard is one movie that takes a whacked plot and proceeds to wring all entertainment value out of it. I think the phrase “train wreck” comes close to describing this inept so-called comedy.
