.

Slackers

Jason Schwartzman, James King, Devon Sawa

Directed by Dewey Nicks
Rolling Stone: star rating
5 0
Community: star rating
5 0 0
February 1, 2002

No penis penetrates a pie in this teen farce — yet another one — but you may want to toss a gooey wad of something at the screen. For starters, what genius thought of calling this twaddle about three college cheaters — Dave (Devon Sawa), Sam (Jason Segel) and Jeff (Michael Maronna) — Slackers? Right away, you think of Richard Linklater's smartly hilarious Slacker, which puts this fluffball at a distinct disadvantage. Even worse is the casting of Jason Schwartzman as Cool Ethan, the loser who threatens to expose the cheaters unless they set him up with gorgeous Angela (James King). Schwartzman isn't bad; he's responsible for the few laughs this movie coughs up (the Angela hair doll he carries is comically perverse). It's just that Schwartzman was the star of Wes Anderson's Rushmore, a classic comedy of school life that further exposes Slackers as a shit stain on the genre and on the young careers of writer David H. Steinberg (he scripted American Pie 2) and director Dewey Nicks. But King, the model with the guy's name, rises above the bilge line just as she did in Pearl Harbor, proving that this looker can survive damn near anything.

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