★★☆☆☆
Dir. John Stalberg. 2010. R. 93mins. Matt Bush, Sean Marquette, Adrien Brody, Michael Chiklis.
Straight-A high-school student Henry Burke (Bush) has a likely lock on valedictorian and early admission to MIT. But he’s just smoked his first-ever joint, the day before the insanely uptight principal (Chiklis) has instituted mandatory drug testing. Only one thing to do: Get the whole school high. But how? That’s where stoner extraordinaire Travis Breaux (Marquette), a gourd-pummeled drug dealer named Psycho Ed (Brody) and a mountain of pot brownies come in.
John Stalberg’s scattershot ganja comedy is the sort of crudely offensive farce that derives laughs from profane exegeses of William Shakespeare, look-who-it-is stunt casting (Booger himself, Curtis Armstrong, is one of the faculty) and an Asian character named Phuc (Ph sounds like f). Stalberg is very adept at two- or three-person interactions: There’s an Abbott and Costello–worthy exchange involving Henry, Travis, and Ed’s slaphappy repetition of the word what (initially croaked by a doped-up frog). But the film becomes sluggish whenever focus expands to the spaced-out students, who shuffle around with unconvincing purposelessness; they don’t seem genuinely narcotized so much as marking time between camera setups. Spurts of loony inspiration aside — Chiklis rivals Animal House’s Dean Wormer for pure hissable self-righteousness — this is mostly all reefer, no madness.—Keith Uhlich
