The New Guy

A nerd who constantly gets ragged on at school is taught to be a “cool” guy by a prison inmate whom he meets, well…in jail. How did he get in jail? I have no idea! Anyway, he gets into a new school soon thereafter, and with his new look and new attitude, he suddenly…yup-yup, gets respect from people! Wow. What an original concept. This premise sucks. Let’s see how the film plays out.

Ugh. This is the part of the job that I hate the most. It makes me wonder if I get paid enough to do this (btw, I don’t get paid at all, so that should tell you something). About halfway through this movie, I looked over to the empty seat next to me (that’s right, nobody wanted to join me for a FREE movie-I should have known right there), and thought about not writing a review at all, since I’d just be wasting my time and even more importantly, your time in reading it. You’d be wasting your time because all you’d really need to do is scoot on over to any of my previous “disposable teen comedy” reviews and re-read them for the same basic complaints and problems that are present in this movie. First of all, is there a story? Not really. It’s a cliché of a cliché of a cliché that was cliché about ten years ago. Did I mention the “timely” PATTON and BRAVEHEART parodies? Is it funny? Not really. I laughed about twice during this entire movie (and one time featured Vanilla Ice!), which actually runs about 86 minutes too long (the entire movie is 90 minutes). Are the actors any good? Not really. Poor D.J. Qualls is simply confirming his top spot as the “geek” in any teen movie, and the umpteen cameos by washed-up rock stars a la Gene Simmons, Vanilla Ice, Tommy Lee (I guess David Lee Roth was out of town) and David Hasselhoff (yeah, he’s huge in Germany), just made you feel even sadder for everyone involved. And Lyle Lovett? Why God…why? As for Eliza Dushku, she’s a babe and a half, but for the love of the bandana that you wear as a shirt in this movie…move on, girl! Don’t turn into the female equivalent of Freddie Prinze Jr. by typecasting yourself as the “sexy slut chick” in every other movie. Yeah, of course I popped a woody when you spent five minutes modeling bikinis for the film’s geek, but what the hell did that have to do with the plot?!? The plot, you say? Oops, sorry about that. I almost forgot…there is no plot!

It’s a clunkily pieced together music video with more truncated edits than most of what you see on MTV, and less character development than your average 30-second coffee commercial. I love the part where the geek walks up to the bully, tells him that what he’s doing is wrong (calling geeks, geeks!) and the entire school (that’s right, every single person), changes their behavior immediately. Wow, this geek (oops, I mean “cool guy”) who still looks like a geek but who we’re supposed to believe is a “cool guy”, really has a lot of power, eh? Ugh. This movie is so lame, I wish I could at least sell it on a T&A level, but they don’t even give us that much! It’s almost as if the studio handed the filmmakers a soundtrack and told them to make a movie out of it. You can barely hear the dialogue over some of the songs…it’s friggin’ ridiculous! Anyway, seeing as the filmmakers didn’t put any real thought into their movie, I’m not going to bother putting more thought into this review. Skip this flick so that none of us have to sit through this kind of crap again (and I don’t have to rehash my old reviews again). I’ll leave you with a CUT&PASTE quote from another one of my “disposable teen comedy” reviews, which basically re-iterates my feelings for this film as well: “I hope that I’m not the only person who is getting a little bored with these recycled movies that we’ve been getting over the past few years. This film’s yet another one, which basically should have been nothing more than a 5-minute sketch on “Saturday Night Live”, but somehow got the greenlight from the top brass at [enter studio name here] because they saw some inherent value in it.” (SORORITY BOYS)

BTW, the director of this film, Ed Decter, is one of the four people who received credit for coming up with the “story” to last year’s HEAD OVER HEELS, starring Freddie Prinze Jr. (which was easily, one of the biggest pieces of shit from 2001). Now think about that…it took four people just to come up with the ingenious plotline for that movie, and this dude was one of them. Now…he’s at the helm of this film! And who wrote this flick, you might be asking yourself? The same man who wrote the “Growing Pains” TV movie (I swear to God I’m not kidding about this). Be afraid, kids…be very afraid!! PS: I love Zooey Deschanel…call me!

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian