Stealing Harvard
Starring Jason Lee, Tom Green

Directed by Bruce McCulloch
PG-13

*3/4 out of 4 Stars

Released September 13, 2002

Running time: 90 minutes

*3/4

by Kevin Lang

With most comedies we usually get a good notion after the first ten minutes of just how enjoyable the film will be. This is usually because the film has already made at least one or even several attempts to make us laugh. In "Stealing Harvard," directed by Bruce McCulloch ("Superstar," 1999) and starring Jason Lee and Tom Green, this was again the case. Unfortunately, I didn't find myself laughing very much as I watched the early jokes unfold, which included Lee's character, John Plummer, finding it uncomfortably strange that his wife cried while they made love. The problem with the joke was that the audience found it uncomfortably strange as well.

The plot was simple. John had promised his niece when she was a little girl that he would pay for her to go to college. His promise caught up with him because she just graduated high school and was accepted to Harvard University. She replayed a videotape of John's promise to her (who taped this we don't know), and afterward he quickly began his desperate quest to steal the $30,000 that she needed in tuition money.

The little bit of humor that the film had to offer came more from the supporting characters than the main cast. Richard Jenkins' character's strange behavior toward burglars, and John C. McGinley's character's reaction to Duff (Tom Green) using his toothbrush from his desk garnered some of the biggest laughs. Marin Starr from TV's short lived "Freaks and Geeks" (1999) added more humor playing the store clerk who had a little too much fun shooting at John and Duff as they made their escape. Despite these moments of humor and a few others, the film failed to sustain any sort of lasting comedic tone.

Tom Green attempted to make us laugh by doing incredibly ridiculous things, which were only funny only because of their sheer absurdity. Green offered a unique brand of film humor, the kind that wasn't funny. We almost ended up feeling more embarrassed for Green than we did the urge to laugh. His humor worked better on his MTV show. Its translation to the big screen didn't come across nearly as effectively because: 1. We were actually paying to see it, and 2. A movie screen is a much different environment than a half hour show, which he had already proved with his little seen "Freddy Got Fingered" (2001). Green wants us to find humor in how weird he can be, sort of a Gibert Godfrey without the skewed face. Don't worry Tom, we can definitely see that your acting weird for us, it's just the humor in it that were left searching for.

Even with a semi-interesting supporting cast, "Stealing Harvard" failed to score with the audience. It was a movie that we might find flipping through the channels late one Saturday night looking for a laugh. However, after several minutes we would switch the channel in search of something more promising. Yet, who knows, if we're tired enough we may just leave it on and fall asleep instead.