Film Reviews

Slackers

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Devon Sawa
• Details: US / 87 mins / (15PG).

Coming across like an odd riff on There's Something About Mary, 'Slackers' follows three college roommates, Dave (Devon Sawa), Sam (Jason Segel) and Jeff (Michael C. Maronna), who have managed to get through college with the minimum amount of work and the maximum amount of partying. Just before their finals, disaster strikes - one of their scams to cheat a test backfires and a nerd called Ethan (Schwartzman) decides to blackmail them. And unless they can ensure that Angela will go out with him, he'll expose them to the college authorities. Dave takes up the challenge and begins to pursue the young lady, only to discover that he is falling for her.
Disjointed and brimming with badly judged gross out jokes involving sexual organs, Slackers is not a particularly inventive, or indeed, humourous fare. There's little consistency here as the 'plot' is basically an excuse to squeeze in as many bad taste gags as is humanly possible. Occasionally director Dewey Nicks shows a flicker of imagination, and Schwartzman is still a very impressive comic actor (remember Rushmore?), but it's all too fleeting in this wasted exercise.

Review by Garreth Murphy