Slackers (2002)
Directed by Dewey Nicks
Written by David H Steinberg
Starring Jason Schwartzman, Devon Sawa, Jason Segal, Laura Prepon, Jamie King
Release Date February 1st, 2002
Published February 2nd, 2002
Oh wow, another movie set on a college campus we haven't seen one of those in what... two or three weeks? To be fair Orange County wasn't entirely set on a college campus but I think you get my point about this being much tread upon ground.
Slackers, not to be confused with the Richard Linklater classic Slacker, stars Devon Sawa as Dave who with the help of his friends, played by Michael C. Maronna and Jason Segel, is the biggest scammer on campus. Despite the title, Dave and his friends actually work pretty hard on their scams to steal test papers and cheat on exams. They work so hard on them in fact it made me wonder if the title was an idea from the movie marketing department and not the writers director or producer.
I had a lot of time to ponder things like the title, the amount of salt on my popcorn and the calories in my Pepsi because I didn't spend any time laughing at this early worst of the year candidate.
Poor Jason Schwartzman, when last we saw him he was in the brilliant film Rushmore. In Slackers he portrays the most unlikable movie character since the babies of Baby Geniuses. Schwartzman spends the entire movie being the creepy stalker of Angela played by Model James King, collecting her hair and forming it into a doll and building a creepy shrine in his dorm room. Why anyone thought any of this was funny I have no idea. Don't get me wrong, I think anything can be funny if done right but if done wrong as it is in Slackers, it's just painful and hard to watch.
The saddest thing about Slackers though is its star Devon Sawa who I really like as an actor. He was fantastic in Final Destination and even in the God-awful Idle Hands. Sawa is charismatic and funny with a great deal of potential as a comedic leading man. Let's hope he can avoid movies like Slackers in the future.
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