Yes it's another high school comedy with a message delivered through the medium of high jinks, nerd vs. jock wars, and slacking off. But Accepted is not without a few raucous laughs and some snappy lines, tipping its hat to the National Lampoon and Revenge of the Nerds series on the way.

Loveable rogue Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) has been rejected by the eight colleges he has applied for and, in an effort to prevent his parents from completely disowning him, he invents a university: South Harmon Institute of Technology (yes, S.H.I.T.), with a disused mental asylum as a campus. Once his best friend Sherman (Jonah Hill) sets up an inadvertently functional website, acceptance is literally a click away. Hilarity ensues as every halfwit college reject in the area is accepted via the website and Bartleby has to cope with preventing his parents from uncovering his fiendish plan and trying to actually operate the sham facility with the help of his friends. But as events unfold and the real Harmon Institute of Technology pokes its snooty, frat boy-ridden nose into the revolutionary shenanigans, Bartleby and his cohorts realise the true meaning of higher education and ask that we all examine our 'square' perceptions and open our minds…

Director Steve Pink, who has previously co-written screenplays for both Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, is here at the helm of a script written by the geniuses who regurgitated the celluloid car crash that was the Olsen twins' classic New York Minute. The comedic flair evident in the aforementioned John Cusack films does appear in flashes, but unfortunately the smart dialogue is too often brushed to the side and Pink is betrayed as more of a hired hand than an effective, actual collaborator. Justin Long is solid in a role that surely would have gone to Mr Cusack twenty years ago, while Jonah Hill as his overweight best friend Sherman, elicits most of the laughs. The film has all the college stereotypes one would expect, including, with no small thanks to the massive success of Napoleon Dynamite, an afro-sporting super geek played with oddball enthusiasm by Adam Herschman, and the goldfish-faced Jeremy Howard as a weirdo kid who wants to blow things up with his mind.

Accepted bows to Hollywood practice by grinding the edge off a variety of clever set ups and when the unavoidable denouement arrives, the 'sticking it to the man' speech given is cringingly horrendous, erasing the memory of much of what is genuinely funny in the movie. The movie also zips along at a steady pace but, as the jokes fizzle out and the by numbers plot falls into place, it is obvious that a much better film was there for the making but compromise and lack of invention has robbed us of what could have been the heir to the 1980s college movie throne.

A film for those suffering with a hangover or recovering from a 'flu, but one which could have been so much funnier.

Adam Lacey

Rated 12A (see IFCO website for details)
Accepted is released on 6th October 2006.
Accepted – Official website