Accepted

Review by: Doc

This movie has one of the funniest twist endings I’ve ever seen.
This is not the movie I intended to review this weekend. Unfortunately, The Illusionist isn’t playing in Rochester at this point and the family needed something light and, hopefully, funny. The trailers looked amusing so the die was cast and I ended up the oldest guy in a theater filled with high-schoolers and we were all laughing out loud for most of the movie.


In a “Revenge of the Nerds Lite” college comedy, Justin Long (the Mac in the “I’m a PC/I’m a Mac commercials) plays the high school con man who, in full Ferris Bueller mode, works very hard to avoid working very hard. He is rejected by all the colleges to which he applies and, to avoid continual humiliation by his disgusted family, he uses his friend’s web skills and his Mac’s Photoshop program to create a college acceptance letter from and web site for South Harmon Institute of Technology. And yes, the initials do make up the word you think. Those initials are the source of many of the easy jokes; the school color is dirty brown, the mascot is a sandwich, etc. The farce becomes complete when the web-savvy friend actually creates a functioning website and hundreds of people accepted to South Harmon via the Web show up for classes with tuition checks in hand.


Long is very good in the role and seems to be auditioning for a future spot taking the fast-talker roles Vince Vaughn or Owen Wilson turns down. His Bartleby Gaines would be very much at home as a partner in the Wedding Crashers mediation firm.


The real Harmon College plays the role of villain with the obligatory weasel of a dean and the Aryan fraternity straight out of Animal House.


I was prepared for a nice, middle-of-the-road 2 ½ scalpel review for an amusingly well-done formulaic comedy when the ending hit me. This movie has one of the funniest twist endings I’ve ever seen. Don’t miss the last ten seconds. I’ll give it 3 of 5 scalpels and a bemused phalanx up.



Doc Hollywood

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