American cinema has produced its fair share of high school slackers, those poster children for the next wave of dropouts and unteachables that give the finger to the system in the name of having a good time.  Ferris Bueller put his cunning mind to anarchic use in planning the perfect day of skiving while Bill & Ted gave their own relaxed Californian take on history lessons.  Set to join their ranks, albeit near the back somewhere, is the amiable Bartleby B Gaines; talented only at projects of underhandedness yet charmingly trying to get into a good college to please his suburbanite parents.

Unfortunately Gaines (Dodgeball�s lanky Justin Long) is rejected by all his possible choices and faces the social humiliation of not getting in anywhere at all, a big no-no if he wants to get a good job and a big house like any other respectable American.  So with brainiac friend Schrader (Hill) and a few other dropouts he sets up a fake college; the South Harmon Institute of Technology.  Amazingly, with a nice letterhead and a functioning web site, he has his parents fooled and happy but things snowball when he must keep up the pretence, roping in a fake principle (Black), renovating an old mental asylum and having to start the college for real when an army of fellow wastrels turn up wanting to enrol.  Gaines being a revolutionary kind of guy decides that they can learn whatever they want, writing down courses of things they want to do that ends up ranging from doing nothing (er, like, surprise?) to blowing things up with their mind.

If this sounds like a severe diatribe on the US education system then prepare to be disappointed, this isn�t the next Dead Poets Society.   However, if you don�t know what diatribe means but think that the abbreviation of the fraudulent institution is pretty funny then you might get some more laughs.  The storyline borrows heavily from the more adult-orientated Old School (a group of guys set up a rocking fraternity on a college campus) but that had one key ingredients for a comedy; comedians.  Justin Long is earnest enough, on a couple of occasion he manages to almost rouse the audience to his cause, but he just tries too hard.  The filmmakers rely on his physical comedy rather than anything genuine so he gets a car boot in the face or falls into a hedge rather than produce any humour derived from the situation and in order to up the laughs he�s surrounded by similar one-trick ponies; Animal House idiot-childs, freaky kids in black and beautiful airheads.

It isn�t long before the S.H.I.T. looks like some mythical Beach Boys video; all pretty people lounging around happy and free.  Everything�s totally protected by that bubble wrap US teen comedies create so their lead characters can live in their own world without of parents and responsibilities.  Accepted promotes following your dreams but it turns out most kids really don�t want to do much except sit and stare at bronzed women in bikinis while capitalism goes on around them.  The situation is laughable, especially to a UK audience who can only regard it compared to the other crass US high school comedies that do little to entertain, just wallow in their own plastic smugness.  How Steve Pink, writer of High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blanke, thought this would make a great directorial debut is a comedy in itself and with such a CV he should have been able to bring a more recognisable and real world to the fore.  Sadly Bartleby B Gaines can only hide out in the corridors of the teen genre, cowering in fear of having his lunch money stolen by the superior Bueller�s of the world.