DRILLBIT TAYLOR (2008)

Staring: Owen Wilson, Leslie Mann, David Dorfman, Troy Gentile, Nate Hartley, Alex Frost

Three nerdy kids hire a homeless guy to be their bodyguard because bullies won't leave them alone, and no adult will believe their stories of violence and torment. Just think Superbad minus the humor, the point and the R-rated language and add lots of kids being punched in the face.

It's the kind of flat, unfunny movie where you sort of chuckle once every 15 minutes or so. But because it's produced by Judd Apatow and co-written by Seth Rogen, you want to like it because it approximates a certain Freaks and Geeks feeling. And you feel bad that you don't. Worse, thanks to its refusal to ground itself in anything resembling real life (which is why that show and the good Apatow-related movies worked), you can't trust it for one second.


“Drillbit Taylor” drags us back to an earlier era of harshly delineated cliques and fierce, hollow calculation, reminiscent of the well-liked 1980s John Hughes films. I must tread carefully here: I know many people adore his films. (I do like “Sixteen Candles.”) But something about the nerds-versus-psychopathic bully premise of “Drillbit Taylor” is off from the beginning: this old thing again? And while screenwriters Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen, along with director Steven Brill, must take the lion’s share of the blame, the story credit is shared by Edmond Dantes, a pseudonym for none other than ... John Hughes.

It's not just that every high school in the United States now has metal detectors, they also have full-time security staffs. But no one involved in this seems to know that or care. We're also asked to believe there are no teachers around monitoring extreme violence in the hallways, no concept of "bullying," no vice principal in charge of discipline and no one bothering to notice a new mysterious faculty member who spends half his time having sex with one of the other teachers. In a classroom. With lots of windows.


We can’t go back to the dear old movie bullies of yesteryear. It’s too late. The world is now officially more dangerous and violent teens aren’t much of a punchline. The new Owen Wilson vehicle “Drillbit Taylor” knows this. The film’s eerily unfunny antagonist skulks around in a hooded sweatshirt, looking like one of the Columbine perps—as much as it’s possible to do so and still exist inside some sort of comedy, albeit a queasy and increasingly grim one.

Emmit attaches himself to the duo as a wobbly third wheel and the daily beatdowns at the hands of Filkins and his equally sadistic buddy Ronnie (Josh Peck) lead the put-upon trio to seek professional protection. A want ad produces a montage of mercenaries (which includes a couple of amusing cameos) and provides them with the only bodyguard they can afford -- Drillbit Taylor (Wilson), an ex-soldier-turned-panhandler who lives in the bushes on a bluff overlooking the Pacific.

Drillbit's extended, credibility-straining stint impersonating a teacher at the boys' school and romancing one of their teachers (the underutilized Mrs. Apatow, Leslie Mann, in a throwaway role), is particularly tangential and plays like outtakes of the similar ruse in Mike White and Richard Linklater's much funnier "School of Rock."