Release Date: May 10, 2002
Starring: DJ Qualls, Eddie Griffin, Eliza Dushku, Zooey Deschanel, Parry Shen, Lyle Lovett
Directed by: Ed Decter
Written by: David Kendall
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Entertainment
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sexual content, language, crude humor, mild drug references)
It’s a bad thing when a movie has about as much substance as its end credits blooper reel. But such is the case with Ed Decter’s The New Guy, a quirky teen comedy that is downright obnoxious in its insistence on trotting out every stale trope of a genre that was dead on arrival several years before its release.
Perhaps it’s not entirely Decter’s fault, who makes his debut behind the camera here. The film had been shelved by distributor Columbia Pictures for over a year, which leads one to believe that if it had predated films like Not Another Teen Movie or even closer relatives like Sorority Boys and Slackers, it might have been fresher.
In truth, that’s a dubious claim, for The New Guy runs on a very thin arsenal of jokes that, at best, half work -- if they weren’t recycled several times over throughout the film’s 100-minute running length. Quite simply, once you’ve seen the first 30 minutes, you’ve seen the entire movie.
For the sake of posterity, then. DJ Qualls, whom genre devotees may remember as the geek from Road Trip, stars as yet another geek in The New Guy. This time he’s Dizzy Harrison, a loser who reinvents himself as the cool kid at another school after being taught the secrets of the trade by his over-the-top prison cellmate Luther (Eddie Griffin, John Q).
As to how exactly Dizzy ends up in prison with Luther is anyone’s guess; the more observant viewers who find themselves duped into watching The New Guy may suspect that this is a harshly edited version of the original release, circa 2000. But then again, most things in The New Guy don’t make sense, so gaping plot holes aren’t entirely out of place.
Surprisingly, the film does stretch its legs a bit in the second and third acts. Dizzy, reborn as bad-to-the-bone Gil Harris, finds himself in the company of several comely babes. The most prominent of these, Danielle (Eliza Dushku, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), teaches him that it’s most important to be yourself.
Yawn. Why is it that teen movies feel as though they must have thematic pretensions? Probably to appease that lower middle-class portion of their limited viewership, whose tastes run just a bit farther than the average gross-out physical comedy shtick. But as with many of its brethren, in The New Guy it’s simply too much weight for the thin excuse of a plot.
There are a number of cameos to be found in the film, although like the rest of The New Guy, they are middling poor at best. Cameos are usually the sort of thing that save movies like this from being a complete waste of time, but when the best the producers could do was Vanilla Ice, Gene Simmons, and a completely nonsensical David Hasselhoff, it only makes matters worse.
The best way of describing The New Guy is something of a cross between superfluous and gratuitous, with an emphasis on the worst of both. There is, for instance, a scene in the second act in which Eliza Dushku prances before the camera in a seemingly endless line of skimpy swimwear, mostly to keep the audience’s collective eyeballs on the screen as the film progresses from bad movie to extra-long music video. It’s enough to make one wish for the more innocent days of the genre, when movies like Empire Records and Scream seemed like a breath of fresh air.
all contents © 2002 Craig Roush