Old School - Uncut

Straight from the director of Road Trip comes this pissweak offering on the veiled subject of the midlife crisis. With the usual attempts at humour that utilise the usual societal outcasts (fat guys, old guys, clumsy guys and so on), this is just another usual one-gag movie. The thing is, that gag just isn’t funny.

The first thing about the film is the main menu opens and boom! Right there in the animated background is the one scene in the film that has girls getting their tops off. So, for a start we think it’s a boobie movie but no, they’re just hoping to drag in the easily fooled. Sorry stuff.

Anyhow, the film is about Mitch (Luke Wilson) who discovers his girlfriend Heidi (Juliette Lewis) getting it on with every other guy (and girl) in town while he’s away with work. So, he moves out and lives just on the campus grounds. This inspires his married best friend Beanie (Vince Vaughn) and his recently married other best friend Frank (Will Ferrell) to hang around his place a lot. When they throw a monster kegger and Frank goes streaking, Frank gets kicked out of home and the boys get booted off campus. However, they find a loophole (of course) and decide to start a fraternity. Naturally, this angers the Dean (who the three guys picked on in school) and it becomes a battle of wills. I won’t tell you who wins, but then do you really need me to?

Juliette Lewis wastes her enormous talents being associated with this and even Seann William Scott is wasted in the two minutes screen time he gets. Luke Wilson is a shock inclusion and Will Ferrell wastes everything I liked about him in Zoolander.

With some fairly average sidebars and weak attempts at laughs, Old School is exactly that; Animal House did it first and better looooong ago (and Ivan Reitman produced both!). There are even weakarse comparisons to Fight Club in that the guys are rebelling against societal and relationship by-laws and such by getting drunk and sleeping with college girls. I mean, come on. Not to mention the apparently excellent chance to include an unnecessary modern terrorist-at-the-airport gag. Woo. That fits.

Full screen delivery at 2.35:1 and 16:9 enhanced portrays the full-scale cinema aspect (watching this film twice will take just longer than it actually lasted at cinemas). Basically everything looks good here, as is usually the case with recent garbage. The colour is fine throughout and blacks look natural. Shadow detail is fine, even indoors during night scenes and the many varied hues of flesh seen throughout are all natural looking (in some entirely unnatural bodies).

Perfect sound is delivered in Dolby Surround 5.1 (plus three other European languages at 5.1). Dialogue is all delivered well and is intelligible, which even includes some drunken ramblings of Will Ferrell’s - not to mention Andy Dick’s ‘gay’ voice. Sound effects are all okay and well synched (naturally there’s lots of breaking glass, girly laughter, KY Jelly sploshing and such. Yes, I said KY Jelly sploshing).

Music is nicely transferred throughout which is important in a frat movie. Snoop Dogg and Warren G play some live stuff which is cool and there are a variety of '80s songs pumping out at any given opportunity. But they aren’t so cool, I don’t care what anyone says. Even if it is Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf (the soundtrack certainly took me back to the '80s and high school, but I didn’t get all nostalgic or middle-aged about it).

One last thing about the menus. There is this one riff that repeats itself over and over and gets so damned annoying by the end you may want to choose extras with the sound down. Plus, all the nudie/sexually soft yet explicit bits are black and whited behind the choices on each menu. Plus one page with a still of the same girls with the same shot of them with their same boobs out. A slack effort and I don’t wonder who they are aiming this DVD at by this point.

So anyway, deleted scenes run for 12:40 and were worthily deleted, though some may have helped continuity by including them. However, some would have depressed the lighthearted approach they go with, so... They are all 2.35:1 and enhanced, so my guess is they were very late deletions.

There's usual fare in the making of bit entitled Old School Orientation. This is the 13-minute suckarse sell job we have all come to know and hate and runs in the TV format of 1.78:1 with 16:9. The usual soundbites etc. from cast and crew.

Inside the Actor’s Studio is obviously some cable show in the States and has been lampooned here by the cast. This runs like an unfunny in-joke for 13:40 and is not very funny at all. Hosted by Will Ferrell in makeup and obviously impersonating someone, he interviews the three major dudes and director. Will Ferrell is computer added to this scene so he can actually ask himself questions and I wonder why they bothered because it’s unfunny and boring with a hefty swear in there from Will to shock us. Weak.

Outtakes and Bloopers ( I hate that word ‘blooper’) run for five odd minutes at 2.35:1 without enhancement and is the usual series of stuff-ups and such. Then two TV spots at 1:30ish each and a photo gallery that houses some 90 pics that are mostly stills from filming.

Oh yeah, and two Easter Eggs that you can find yourself (it ain’t hard folks) or go and read about in our Easter Eggs section.

This is a ragged film without direction that only houses a couple of okay laughs within. It’s a fairly standard campus flick with the added creepiness of guys beyond the age group getting involved. Sure it’s fun to be crazy and zany and stuff, but when 30 to 40 year olds are guzzling brews with kids half their ages? Monumentally uncool. Luke Wilson should have know better than to get involved with this, and it seems apparent in some scenes when he looks and acts like someone caught naked with a hairbrush microphone or tennis-racket guitar in front of the mirror.

This is last minute closing at the local video store stuff at best. The laughs are sporadic and the rest is just embarrassingly stupid. I never thought I’d say these words, but Road Trip was better.

Now I feel unclean.