Accepted (Widescreen) (2006)

Justin Long stars as Bartleby Gaines who has been rejected from every school he’s applied to. Desperate to please his disconcerted parents, who believe college is a mandatory part of life, Bartleby decides to scan a rejection letter and create a phony letter of acceptation from a fictitious school. Appropriately dubbed the South Harmon Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T.), Bartleby gets his best friend Sherman (Jonah Hill) to create an official-looking website for the school, which escalates the ruse. Along with a group of misfits, including Columbus Short, Adam Herschman and Maria Thayer, who similarly failed to be accepted to a college, Gaines accesses an abandoned insane asylum as a further façade for his parents, who plan on dropping him off at college on his first day. Sherman’s Uncle Ben (Lewis Black) is additionally recruited to act as the dean for the institute. Hilarity ensues as Bartleby and his friends discover that hundreds of other rejected kids have accidentally been accepted to South Harmon, and so the makeshift staff decides to help these outcasts rather than turn them away. The screenplay is hysterical, although peculiarly devoid of strong language, and the situations and central plot points are well executed. The film is relatively short and suitably paced. The target audience is clearly college kids, and yet for some unperceived reason, the creators decided to push for the PG-13 rating instead of R. Although this allows for younger audiences to actually purchase tickets (otherwise they’ll buy tickets for a different film and sneak into the R-rated one), it also deters the college kids themselves from going, who feel PG-13 is not mature enough. Nudity and strong language don’t belong in every film, but this one could have been funnier and raunchier with little additions that were probably originally shot only to be ousted later on. Recently studios seem to be ignoring the statistics about the rating system and how they affect their films. PG-13 is increasingly more for kids and the adult audiences just don’t want to see films that are obviously edited down for content. The trailers lead you to believe it will be an American Pie style film, but it’s difficult to compare the two, since Accepted is a bit too squeaky clean. However, no dull moments prevail, and although some of the jokes don’t work, they are quickly subdued by stronger and more elaborate gags. I would have liked to see some riskier content, but overall the film delivers its witticism and laughs effortlessly. While there are multitudes of teen comedies out there, Accepted has undeniable charm, excellent character acting, and of course the always cynical favorite, Lewis Black. - Read the full review at www.MoviePulse.net
 
Was this review helpful?    

DVD > College Movies