“Accepted” stars one of my favorite young hollywood stars, Justin Long, who usually plays bit roles, or is the sidekick; this time Long gets a chance to really carry a movie. This is one of those films that I really don’t have much to say about it.
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Bartleby Gaines (Long) is a good natured schemer, who spends his entire high school career coming up with plans to get out of going to classes, or ways to get a bully off his back, or creating fake ids for his fellow students. He’s so busy with his plans that he neglects to properly prepare himself for the College Admissions game. Which is surprising because you would think a kid like this would have some sort of brilliant scheme to get past the admissions process. But no, he doesn’t and he gets turned down by every college he applies to.
After he tells his parents that he didn’t get into College he comes up with the idea to forge an acceptance letter from a fake college. To help sell the idea that college is real, he has his best friend Sherman Schrader (Jonah Hill) set up a fake website for their fake college.
To further the illusion that the college is real, Bartleby or B as his friends call him, convert an old rundown mental institution into a college campus to fool his parents who come to visit. He and his friends, Rory (Maria Thayer), and Hands (Columbus Short) have it made, until B realizes the website was fully functioning and thousands of kids applied and got “accepted” to their college.
The chemistry from the cast was good, you can tell they had a lot of fun making this movie, and that sense of exuberance translates to the screen. The plotting of this movie is standard, by the numbers affair. No surprises here and for a comedy it lacks laughs. There are several cliche jokes that get repeated, like the jock who becomes a sculpture but has a fascination with the male member. Or the fat kid who gets abused and humiliated while trying to pledge a preppy frat that his father belonged to. There’s the smart, beautiful girl, Monica (Blake Lively) who dates the preppy, jerk, frat boy.
As I said, nothing happens in this film that you don’t expect to happen, and it’s that lack of originality that causes the film to drag in spots. But it’s still a perfectly fine, little film whose earnestness and cast chemistry ultimately won me over.
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Final Grade – C+
EM Review
by Michelle Alexandria
Originally Posted 8/19/06