College comedy is slacking in humorous material
As a grandiose string version of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” plays in the background, three college students pull off an equally well-orchestrated cheating scam. Sam (Jason Segel) feigns a traffic accident that allows Jeff (Michael C. Maronna) to steal a University Blue Book from the back of a delivery truck. In the meantime, Dave (Devon Sawa) pretends to take a midterm, when he is really only there to copy test questions that Sam will apply the heisted answers to later.
While in the classroom, Dave meets comely co-ed Angela (model James King), and writes his real name and phone number on a bogus test for her. This irritates Cool Ethan (Jason Schwartzman) who is secretly stalking Angela, and he confronts the three friends and threatens to expose them to the university unless they help him consummate his crush.
These early scenes show a certain visual flair and lightness of touch by novice director Dewey Nicks that wanes as the movie progresses. When the trio is in full swindling mode, “Slackers” has a real sense of purpose. (“My college career is a house of cards glued together with thousands of tiny little lies,” Sam gives as his reasoning for succumbing to Ethan’s blackmail.) But Nicks starts pushing the plausibility factor in ways that eventually collapse his own dormitory of cards.
First, he turns Ethan from a potential comic annoyance (picture Anthony Michael Hall in “Sixteen Candles) to a raving menace (see
Kevin Spacey in “Seven”). Schwartzman, who was certainly memorable as the offbeat lead in “Rushmore,” portrays Ethan, a troubled individual whose ideas of affection include collecting Angela’s stray hairs, which are woven into a little doll he sleeps with. The filmmakers construct abrasive situations where Angela is supposed to be mildly pestered by his behavior, though “she can still count on him as a friend.” In any other universe, she’d be slapping a restraining order on the guy immediately, in constant fear of winding up under the floorboards of his dorm room.
Second, Nicks takes the predictable indulgent detour into gross-out humor. Between the pedestrian S&M and masturbation jokes, viewers are treated to a hospital scene in which Ethan gives a sponge bath to a former harlot, played by 70-year-old mammary icon Mamie Van Doren.
The sequence is indicative of most of the film, in that the situation could have been amusing but ends up merely coarse and disturbing.
And what’s the deal with calling the movie “Slackers?” The story really isn’t about slacking – the main characters are for too ambitious and organized to merit that term. (The project’s working title shifted from “Hooking Up Ethan” to “Scam” to “The Undergrads,” any of which are superior.) Also, the name can’t help but invoke Richard Linklater’s 1991 effort “Slacker,” which ushered in a whole generation of guerilla filmmaking. Going with this title is about as original as calling the movie “Animal Houses.”