'Drillbit Taylor' not a sharp comedy

(C-) Drillbit Taylor, with Owen Wilson as a flake-for-hire bodyguard to a trio of high-school uber-nerds, has plenty of heart. It also has a made-to-order audience in the millions of us who tend to identify more with the geeky outcasts in high-school comedies than the bullies who torment or the big men on campus who routinely eclipse them.

If only it had some funny lines, a focused plot and an idea that stretched beyond the initial setup.

For nearly its entire 102-minute running time, Drillbit Taylor strains - for laughs, for credibility, for continuity, for something that will fulfill its potential. It rarely succeeds.

Wilson, strictly on autopilot, is Drillbit, a homeless but good-natured opportunist who banters humorously with motorists and takes his showers on the public beach. Constantly looking for an easy buck, Drillbit thinks he's found a ticket to the good life when he answers an Internet ad from three kids looking for protection from the high-school bully. Though he's all false bravado and feigned competence, Drillbit gains the kids' confidence.

That, and he's the only person who'll work for the 87 bucks the kids scrape together.

The best bits of Drillbit Taylor involve the three kids, each of whom brings energy and enthusiasm to his role. Which isn't to say their characters are in any way original: Wade (Nate Hartley) is a bespectacled beanpole, Ryan (Troy Gentile) is fat and Emmit (David Dorfman) is a runt. All hail from Hollywood's catalog of cliched characters, but the actors - especially Hartley and Gentile - display nice chemistry.

But neither director Steven Brill (Little Nicky) nor his writers, Seth Rogen and Kristofor Brown, knows what to do with any of these characters. The film's story unfolds as though scenes were thrown together at the last minute or shoved into places they didn't belong. Characters disappear for long stretches, plot developments seem to occur largely offscreen and key events occur for no reason other than the capricious whims of the scriptwriters.

At its most basic level, however, Drillbit Taylor simply isn't funny. Being tormented by a school bully can be mined for laughs, but not being tortured by one. Watching a kid get shoved into a locker can elicit a chuckle, but forcing one kid to pee on another isn't quite a laugh riot (especially when we get to watch it happen twice). It doesn't help that the prime bully, Filkins (Alex Frost), comes across as more psychopathic than mean, or that the school principal, played by the normally dependable Stephen Root, is at best clueless, at worst, indictable.

Throughout the film, Wilson's engaging airhead persona is constantly called upon to remind the audience that this is, after all, a comedy. Sometimes it works, as when Drillbit tries teaching his teen employers the fundamentals of self-defense. But mostly, the actor and the film just seem tired, anxious for everything to wrap up.

Surely, Wilson is getting tired of playing the carefree slacker who has a moment of conscience about two-thirds of the way through the film and finally does the right thing. I'm not sure, but I think I saw him roll his eyes at the supposedly transformative moment here. If he didn't, I sure did.

Perhaps most depressing is that this movie marks the first major misstep from producer Judd Apatow, who's been the hottest thing in film comedy since writing and directing 2005's The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Maybe because the movie's creative team (including Rogen, star of Knocked Up and writer of Superbad) was determined to tone things down enough that the film get a PG-13 rating, Drillbit seems unnecessarily restrained, as though young kids couldn't handle true anarchy and subversiveness.

Then again, Apatow created and Rogen starred in the brilliant Freaks and Geeks, which was set amid the same emotional and physical maelstrom that is high school. Apatow and his team toned Freaks and Geeks down enough to make it acceptable for network TV. Drillbit Taylor, which seems to be aiming for much the same audience, doesn't even belong in the same league.

>>>Drillbit Taylor (Paramount Pictures) Starring Owen Wilson, Nate Hartley, Troy Gentile. Directed by Steven Brill. Rated PG-13 for language and brief nudity. Time 102 minutes.

chris.kaltenbach@baltsun.com

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