There is an audience out there for movies about primitive idiots, as Adam Sandler proves year after year after year. Yet, for every Adam-Sandler blockbuster, there are at least twenty duds that don’t quite capture the Sandman’s box-office magic. Personally, I’ve never liked any movie starring Adam Sandler, so I don’t know why his movies make more money than other similar movies (Sandler’s efforts are as bad as all the other primitive-idiots movies).

School for Scoundrels is yet another primitive-idiots movie from Todd Phillips, the man responsible for Old School. (I guess Mr. Phillips likes educational settings.) In School for Scoundrels, Jon Heder plays a loser who takes secret classes from a con artist played by Billy Bob Thornton. In the classes, Thornton instructs his pupils on how to “act like men” and “take what they want”. This ultimately involves--what else?--getting a woman into bed. School for Scoundrels draws inspiration from Fight Club, Tom Cruise in Magnolia, and a bunch of other sources, but the movie never amounts to much. While Billy Bob Thornton is always fun to watch, Jon Heder is so much of a zero that we don’t root for him, even in that routine identify-with-the-protagonist sort of way. The rest of the cast is similarly bland, though Ben Stiller contributes a few chuckles in a cameo. The funniest bits in the movie involve paintball and tennis-ball shots to crotches, though mercifully, the movie doesn’t overuse them. Leaving viewers wanting more is a smart thing to do.

The Unrated Ballbuster Edition seems tame enough to get an R rating from the MPAA, so it’s probably not very different from the theatrical version.

David McCoy