And the rebranding of Justin Long continues. While I mostly remember Long for his nerd roles in Galaxy Quest and Dodgeball he seems to be quietly but steadily turning into a beautiful butterfly. At least in studio executives eyes that is. Despite being not very good-looking and the very antithesis of masculinity, Long has been building up a resume of hot onscreen babes, including Lindsay Lohan (pre-boniness) and Britney Spears (pre-becoming a fat whore). His role in Waiting� was surprisingly cool and together, and he�s rapidly becoming Tinseltown�s go-to guy for the smart yet lovable teen goof.
In Accepted he gets to do all this again. As the unfortunately monikered Bartleby Gaines Long is, duh, a popular slacker whose lack of effort lands him with not one but eight rejection notices from prospective colleges. Looking at a lifetime of failure he concocts a brilliant scheme to create his own University and fool, temporarily, his parents into thinking he was accepted into the South Harmon Institute of Technology (you don�t really have to think about it), a local sister college of the far more prestigious Harmon College down the road. After enlisting a few other languid friends they renovate an old mental hospital (with what money I do not know) and the ruse is complete. A little too complete though, as students from all over start showing up, waving $10,000 cheques in the air and bunking down.
There�s a great deal of implausibility involved in Accepted, more even than would normally be expected even in such a ludicrous genre as the teen comedy. This tends to get in the way of the rest of the story quite a bit, and as that is usually just a rehash of the god-awful Van Wilder it�s not hard to lose interest. Long�s performance is thankfully very good, having clearly learnt the art of the fearless, rambling comic insult from his Waiting... co-star Ryan Reynolds (who, coincidentally, was also in Van Wilder). He is given good support from Jonah Hill, as his overweight but academically-blessed best friend Sherman, but the rest of the cast blends sadly into the background.
The bad guys are also a very limp bunch, consisting of the Harmon College Dean Van Horne (Heald) and Sherman�s anonymous fraternity brothers. They don�t really have much to do and if I have to watch one more college-set �comedy� which casts an old-school WASPish fraternity as a bunch of dumb legacy idiots I might have to give up on my eyes altogether. It�s not that they�re not a legitimate target, it�s more that fraternities have been done to death, and in the age of innocent Duke lacrosse players being dragged through the mud they deserve a bit of a break. For now. Anyway, I�m sure someone will remake Van Wilder soon and actually make it worthwhile. Till then this is the best anyone�s done yet. |
