The best thing "Accepted" has going for it is that, despite looking like a raunchy "Animal House" kind of campus comedy, at heart it has sort of an innocent, throwback, Andy Hardy-ish attitude about it. Except that instead of Hardy's "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" it's "Hey, kids, let's put on a four-year accredited university!"
That sunny attitude gets you most of the way past the fact that "Accepted" doesn't exploit the comic possibilities of its premise %u2013 a group of teens create a fake college, and then have to turn it into a real one %u2013 nearly as much as it should. But when "Accepted" decides in the third act that it's going to be a "message" movie about the hardships of the university system, that goodwill dries up fast.
Directed by Steve Pink, who co-wrote the John Cusack vehicles "Grosse Point Blank" and "High Fidelity" (and presented "Fidelity" at the Wisconsin Film Festival several years ago), "Accepted" starts with a solid premise that's particularly resonant at this time of year. Likable underachiever Bartleby (Justin Long of "Ed" and the Apple commercials) finds that he's been rejected by his dream college. And his safe school. And every other place he applied to.
In a panic, he and several other rejected classmates decide to buy themselves some time by inventing the "South Harmon Institute of Technology" and whipping up a fake university web site and fake letters of acceptance. When Bartleby's father starts getting suspicious, he and his friends take over an abandoned mental hospital and rehab it so that it looks to the casual eye like a college campus.
The ruse works perfectly %u2013 so perfectly, in fact, that on the first day of school, hundreds of other rejected students show up at the front doors, believing they've been accepted to a real school. Bartleby doesn't have the heart to tell them otherwise, so he whips up a student-generated curriculum ("Daydreaming 403" and "Wingman 201" are on the list) and hires a loose-cannon former professor (Lewis Black in full froth) to impersonate the school dean.
It's a setup that can be pretty amusing in the first half of the film, especially since Long and his supporting cast of misfits are so likable. Jonah Hill, as Long's portly best friend, gets a ton of good deadpan lines, as when the teens are first exploring the creepy abandoned hospital, and Hill wonders if he's updated his "hobo-stab insurance."
But Hill's character gets largely taken out of the mix, put into a subplot where he's being cruelly humiliated as a fraternity pledge at snooty rival Harmon Collee, and what happens to him exemplifies what goes wrong with the film. Instead of chasing laughs, "Accepted" gets preachy about the pressures of getting into college and the pressures of attending college. Rather than ending with a big comic splash, the movie finishes with a big rah-rah speech by Bartleby before the state board of education, where he tries to argue that "Walking Around And Thinking About Stuff 101" is as valuable an education as "Chemistry 101."
This view of "learning" as inward-looking navel-gazing rather than embracing new external information and experiences strikes me as pretty self-congratulatory. But more importantly, it strikes me as not funny, and that's the standard by which a comedy passes or fails.