Old School

Directed by Todd Phillips, Old School follows three friends (Luke Wilson’s Mitch, Will Ferrell’s Frank, and Vince Vaughn’s Beanie) as they decide to start a fraternity after Mitch is told his house has been zoned for college use only. It’s a decidedly broad premise that’s employed to watchable, sporadically hilarious effect by Phillips, as the filmmaker, working from a script written with Scot Armstrong, delivers a briskly-paced endeavor that’s been crammed with laugh-out-loud funny set-pieces and a whole raft of appealing performances – with the stars’ strong work here matched by an eclectic supporting cast that includes Jeremy Piven, Juliette Lewis, and Seann William Scott. (The sequence involving the latter, in which he plays an animal handler responsible for shooting Ferrell’s Frank with a tranquilizer dart, remains an obvious highlight within the proceedings.) There’s little doubt, however, that Old School, even at a running time under 90 minutes, does begin to run out of steam somewhere around the one-hour mark, as Phillips delivers a comparatively tedious final third that feels too conventional and too familiar to make much in the way of a positive impact – which ultimately does cement the picture’s place as an erratic yet mostly solid comedy that’s often more effective in terms of its performances rather than its content. (Ferrell has rarely been better, that’s for sure.)

*** out of ****