'Accepted': Grade It 'D' for Dumb

As freshmen Volkswagen off to the archways of higher education, what better time for a movie to pose questions about the purpose of a college experience ?

Let's have a parody of admissions officers who overlook average Joes in favor of applicants who fence competitively. Let's chuckle at boomer parents, who once cut class to inhale but now dismiss any non-collegiate path as life on the streets. And why not parody institutions that enlighten young minds but burden young backs with student debt? We kinda hoped "Accepted" would be that film. It's not.

What it is: Mate the casts of 1978's "Animal House" and 1984's "Revenge of the Nerds," and enroll their raucous, kvetching offspring at a college for rejects. A fluffy teen comedy, it may pose smart questions, but unfortunately it provides only the dumb answers of a class clown -- one who quickly becomes annoying.

Unlikely hero Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) has been rejected by every college to which he applied. So he enlists his experience making fake IDs to falsify an acceptance letter from South Harmon Institute of Technology (just imagine the acronym on a sweatshirt) -- an institution he's just made up. When his parents announce their intention to drop Bartleby off at school, the problem -- there is no school! -- is quickly solved by a cutesy "Trading Spaces"-like montage that paints over an abandoned psychiatric hospital in bright pastel.

The parents buy the hoax, and so do hundreds of other college rejects who've come across Bartleby's fake Web site. It's a student body of burnouts and stoners, airheads and strippers (who pay their tuition in singles), played not by offbeat character actors but underwear-model- beautiful extras made to look offbeat and ugly. It's impossible to cheer these supposed "underdogs." And even Long's character is inconsistent: Passive enough to not really try on college applications, he later displays the entrepreneurial gumption to found a fake college.

The laughs come from one-liners and single-note jokes. A student in a Viking hat attempts physical comedy on a Slip 'N Slide; another asks for a "shrimp smoothie" because "I'm hungry and thirsty." We're even given a beat to laugh.

Lending some refreshing cynicism is the college "dean" hired to mollify parents, played by comedian Lewis Black. A disgruntled shoe salesman fired for ranting against commercial greed to 6-year-olds who just want to buy Nikes, Black is the perfect doddering professor -- an old, grizzled dude who gives long, pseudo-intellectual speeches a la his "Daily Show" shtick.

It's too bad the movie didn't learn some lessons from the tightly written "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," which also featured Long and a team of struggling misfits -- ones you cared about in a film with jokes that successfully parodied elitism and corporate greed (and ESPN).

In "Accepted," as the bulldozers approach the fake college, we barely care. What's the value of a school whose greatest merit is its promise to accept every student? At least the film serves up this one jab, from Black, who while delivering a scripted speech to Bartleby's parents suddenly gestures wildly, swears, profanely renounces it and declares the aim of college simply to get a better job that's better paid.

Bartleby's mortified. The jig is up.

But of course it's music to a boomer's ears. "It's so refreshing," declares Dad, "to hear someone approach education so rationally."

Accepted (90 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for profanity, drug content and sexual material.