Accepted

Review by Jason Gaston

Why do they even try? Why do studios continually pump out movies hoping to be the next Animal House but with a PG-13 rating? It's never going to happen. Why do they keep trying?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the tale of how a few losers who can't get into college invent a fake one called The South Harmon Institute of Technology or S.H.I.T. as they call it.

These are the jokes, people.

Soon this fake college gets out of hand and people everywhere are coming out of the woodwork to become S.H.I.T. alumni so much so that a prestigious and snooty university wants to bring them down because, after all, if S.H.I.T. is accepting just anyone, how prestigious could they really be?

What Accepted boils down to is some transparent and artifical message about being accepted as who you are. This is supposed to give the title a double meaning or something, but at the end I bet you're just going to be too bored to notice or appreciate it.

Let me put it another way. Take the plot and imagine a number of different scenarios that might happen with it and, chances are, every one of your scenarios are in the movie. There's nothing surprising about it and nothing terribly hilarious either.

In short, this is a tame pedestrian movie, a lazy attempt at comedy, and a cinematic poser trying to look like a legendary college party movie that doesn't even have the gumption  to at least show some good tat to keep the bored masses entertained.

Accepted is doofy, loud, and occasionally obnoxious. The movie is all over the place, but I have to hand it to Justin Long and his gallant but futile attempt to hold it together by channeling Ferris Bueller, but then again it begs the question, why watch this when Ferris Bueller's Day Off is readily available?

In the end, there's not enough funny to make this banal movie float and, personally, I find that... unacceptable.