The Leader

Let’s have a little synopsis here, just to put everything in perspective: Remember that magical time between graduation from high school and your first year in college? Remember the thrill of driving to your home in your Yuppie Ville Heights Gated Community in the Escalade mommy and daddy bought you, opening your mail and rooting through acceptance letters from the various Ivy League universities you applied to, and then went to your local, trendy coffee shop to show all of your friends, Stoner, Artiste, Nerdlington, Jockstrap and Minority? Ok, this only happens in vapid, insipid teen comedies, but that’s the point.

This is one such stupid, painfully banal comedy in which a bunch of prep-school-teen-movie clones don’t get into any of the colleges they apply for. The idiot leader of this particular clique, Bartleby, “B” as his “friends” called him, hatches a plan to invent a fake school, get his friends in, and steal their parents’ money for four years and pretty much crap around until graduation… the only element in this film remotely based off real life. They even base their school’s name off the local Ivy League university: South Harmon Institute of Technology. Now process that into an acronym. Now realize that the South Harmon Institute of Technology’s mascot is a sandwich.

Now realize how two hours of my life are lost forever, having no way to demand a refund.

I honestly cannot recall a single moment that made me laugh. There may have been a mild smirk from some little farce, but nothing, absolutely nothing about this movie was funny. I hated the characters, every last one of them; every little problem they found themselves in, they dug themselves in deeper. Bartleby and was an inveterate liar, his “stoner” buddy Glen (marijuana- always guaranteed for a bucket of laughs!) was a yutz with a white-guy Afro… an abomination I can’t be bothered to get into lest I want to induce wrath, a token Black friend, Hands, who invested more time in the “maleness” of his sculptures than I’m comfortable to discuss and a female friend who thought she was smart enough to get into Yale, but apparently wasn’t smart enough to send out applications to any back-up schools.  

Lewis Black’s presence does little to elevate this two-hour long waste of cinema. He has a total screen presence of 15 minutes, and even then, he’s just out-Lewis-Black-ing himself; or trying to. You’d be better off sharpening a spoon against your dorm room wall and shoving it in your eye than wallow through this pile of trash.

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