School for Scoundrels

School for Scoundrels is a mostly tepid and only mildly entertaining comedy. It gets by on meager charm, but lacks the sort of wit necessary to make a comedy of this sort worth watching. Todd Phillips (Old School) directs Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder as Roger, a loser with a heart of gold who joins a secret school designed to turn nice guys into manipulative womanizers. Classes are run by Dr. P (Billy Bob Thornton) and his assistant Lesher (Michael Clarke Duncan in top scene stealing form). The film focuses on the class sessions briefly and later settles into a story about Dr. P’s battle to outdo the newly suave Roger in his attempts to woo his charming neighbor, Amanda (Jacinda Barrett). Most of the comedy here is derived from cheap sight gags and mild violence (Duncan in a dress, vicious paint ball games, etc.). The film dabbles in dark comedy with jokes about rape and murder, but its limited PG-13 perspective prevents it from crafting any truly biting humor. Similarly, its occasional stabs at romantic comedy are thwarted by its insistence in shading every scene with a wholly unbelievable and usually unnecessary sense of brutality. This film clearly believes itself to be in the vein of its Frat Pack predecessors or Thornton’s other, more wonderfully morose black comedies. Unfortunately, this is an underwhelming and very tired retread of those precursors. It should also be noted that the film is loosely based on the 1960 British comedy School for Scoundrels or How to Win Without Actually Cheating!, which was an adaptation itself (the material was borrowed from books by Stephen Potter). Clearly, School for Scoundrels is by no means a work of originality, but its ultimate failure is that it’s simply not funny.

Grade: C-