A film that
threatens to give gratuitous nudity, profanity, and rank stupidity a bad name, College casts Drake Bell of Nickelodeon's Drake
& Josh (you can probably guess which
one he plays) as an uptight high-school senior whose girlfriend dumps him for
being boring. Eager to prove her wrong, Bell heads to a local college for a Dionysian
weekend alongside McLovin wannabe Kevin Covais (rapidly burning off the 15
minutes in the spotlight his turn on American Idol afforded him) and hard-partying fat slob Andrew
Caldwell, who appears to be the product of an experiment to clone Chris Farley
gone horribly awry. The three wan stereotypes end up crashing at a disreputable
fraternity house under the Stalin-like rule of suspiciously ancient actors who
haven't looked college-age since early in the Clinton era.
College is powered by alternating currents of wish-fulfillment
and mindless cruelty. So the hapless high-school dorks spend 10 percent of the
film inexplicably getting laid, 80 percent of the film getting humiliated, and 10
percent enacting unlikely revenge on their geriatric tormentors. It's a joyless
misfire determined to deliver the time-tested staples of the college
comedy—pot-smoking, binge drinking, cruel pranks, anonymous hook-ups, authority-offending,
nonstop boobage—in the most perfunctory, least satisfying manner
imaginable. It's not an encouraging sign when the appearance of a
urination-happy Verne Troyer—in his worst film of the summer, no small
feat considering the competition is Uwe Boll's Postal and Mike Meyers' The Love Guru—classes up the proceedings considerably. First-time
director Deb Hagan desperately wants her hard-R College to be Superbad. Instead, it's merely god-awful.
