What makes the movie work is that the premise, which sounds like a comedy, is treated with the seriousness of life and death.
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07/13/02
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Harvard Man (2002)
33
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:36
Fresh:12
Rotten:24
Average Rating:4.6/10
Consensus: Harvard Man is a pretentious, incoherent mess.
Runtime: 1 hr 40 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Apr 12, 2002 Limited
Synopsis: This innovative drama from writer and director James Toback (BUGSY, BLACK AND WHITE) follows the travails of Alan Jensen (Adrian Grenier), a Harvard student determined to live life to the fullest... [More]
Starring: Adrian Grenier, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Eric Stoltz, Rebecca Gayheart
Director: James Toback
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Reviews for Harvard Man
Top CriticToback offers a complex, borderline campy, and oddly entertaining study of modern moral dilemmas.
07/11/02
Top CriticA crisply made movie that is no more than mildly amusing.
07/09/02
Top CriticHarvard Man is a semi-throwback, a reminiscence without nostalgia or sentimentality.
07/03/02
A characteristically engorged and sloppy coming-of-age movie.
07/02/02
Top CriticPutting it all out there and shaping it into some kind of contained whole is something else again. Although that never quite happens here, there's plenty to appreciate.
07/02/02
Top CriticIn a summer of clones, Harvard Man is something rare and riveting: a wild ride that relies on more than special effects.
07/01/02
Top CriticThis movie is so bad, that it's almost worth seeing because it's so bad.
07/01/02
Top CriticA cautionary tale about the grandiosity of a college student who sees himself as impervious to a fall.
06/28/02
By turns pretentious, fascinating, ludicrous, provocative and vainglorious.
06/28/02
Top CriticUnintelligible, poorly acted, brain-slappingly bad, Harvard Man is ludicrous enough that it could become a cult classic.
06/28/02
The long-delayed flick's weak story and poor casting shows that Gellar is too cute to be Corleone; Adams is too high-pitched to be tenured; and Gayheart is still too whatever to care about.
06/28/02
A reality-snubbing hodgepodge.
06/28/02
It's exactly the kind of movie Toback's detractors always accuse him of making.
06/28/02
Top Critic[Toback's] fondness for fancy split-screen, stuttering editing and pompous references to Wittgenstein and Kirkegaard ... blends uneasily with the titillating material.
06/27/02
It has a caffeinated, sloppy brilliance, sparkling with ideas you wish had been developed with more care, but animated by an energy that puts the dutiful efforts of more disciplined grade-grubbers to shame.
06/27/02
Top CriticCharacteristic of Toback in that there's no telling whether he doesn't care to wrestle his totems into any kind of meaningful order or if he simply doesn't know how.
06/25/02
Top CriticClick to read the article
06/15/02
Fans of so-bad-they're-good cinema may find some fun in this jumbled mess.
06/04/02
Click to read the article
05/17/02
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