Who's In It: Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Ritter, Chris Marquette, Eva Amurri, Sebastian Stan
The Basics: Charlie Banks rats out a teen sociopath after the thug nearly murders two obnoxious jocks. The attempted murderer goes free anyway and Charlie heads off to an Ivy League college. But his peace of mind is interrupted when the aimless brawler shows up on campus and decides he wants to hang out there and have casual sex with girls from good families on a permanent basis. He even gets a Lacoste-intensive makeover from the most dissolute of the richies. From there it's one preppy ethical challenge after another: being an outcast on the croquet lawn, fighting in bars, scaring people into being responsible and doing their homework, marking up the library with graffiti. So bad!
What's The Deal: You will spend this film's entire 100+ minutes waiting for the inevitable moment of reckoning between Charlie and the young thug he fears the most. It happens in the final minutes, predictably and anti-climactically. But before that moment you float along in a haze of wonderment: about why Fred Durst would choose material like this for his directing debut (Yes, that Fred Durst. And though this is the second movie he's had released into theaters, it was the first one he made); about why anyone thinks Jason Ritter is tough enough to play the bad guy; and about on which planet do college freshmen engage in earnest conversations about The Great Gatsby other than one where their movements are scripted toward an ending that borrows from that earlier classic story of rich young things.
Annoying Stuff: I hate it when period films like this (early 1970s to the early 1980s) get details wrong, even down to posters on teenagers' walls. But here there's so clearly a determination to give you the prettiest version of the era, a nostalgic filter that disregards truth in favor of visual texture and gives the audience pleasing hair and clothes and makeup to look at, that it might as well just be set in 2009. Why bother if you're not going to just go ahead and do it properly? You think all we know is what we see on reruns of That 70s Show?
The Only Character In This Movie Who Doesn't Deserve To Be Terrorized By Jason Ritter's Character: The mousy financial aid-receiving girl that everyone laughs at and who winds up with an unresolved storyline. In fact, if we're to believe the script, then she'll wind up kicked out of school because of a series of problems set in motion by the antics of the privileged jerks. But the movie doesn't care enough about her fate to let us know. So when Jason Ritter stomps on the guy who causes her trouble, the punishment doesn't seem undeserved, no matter how much the other kids are shocked by it.