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MORTAR BORED Schwartzman goes back to school with (from l. to r.) James King, Devon Sawa, Michael C. Maronna, Laura Prepon, and Jason Segel
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Release Date: Feb 01, 2002; Rated: R; Length: 86 Minutes; Genre: Comedy; With: James King, Michael C. Maronna, Devon Sawa, Jason Schwartzman and Jason Segel
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Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW
Not another teen movie -- please. If Jason Schwartzman had forced his agent at knifepoint to come up with a role that would squander the precocious, chewing-gum-on-the-wall, junior-Dustin Hoffman cachet that the actor built up in ''Rushmore,'' the agent couldn't have done much better than to get him cast in Slackers.
Schwartzman, flexing his beetle brows, plays a spiteful, charmless loser -- a grotesque creep slouching under the weight of his backpack -- who blackmails a carefree trio of exam cheaters into setting him up with the campus hottie. The movie doesn't so much extend Schwartzman's antic outsider persona from ''Rushmore'' as uglify it, reducing him to the ultimate Uncool Anti-WASP. At one point, he has to sponge down the aging '50s Z-movie siren Mamie Van Doren and take a nibble of her pendulous freckled breast. (This is not a scene you want on your résumé.)
''Slackers'' starts out looking as if it might be a smart satire of collegiate fraudulence, complete with convoluted Rube Goldberg schemes for faking blue-book mastery, but it sinks into the usual cafeteria goulash of fart jokes, masturbation jokes, and racist Japanese jokes, the bulk of them set to pointlessly ironic twee orchestral renditions of ''Baba O'Riley'' and other rock chestnuts.
Posted Jan 30, 2002
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