Weird, then, how the cast play as if holding their breath for the pay cheque.
Stealing Harvard (2002)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:102
Fresh:8
Rotten:94
Average Rating:3.2/10
Consensus: There are laughs Stealing Harvard, but they are few and far between. Tom Green's antics grow old fast.
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Comedies
Synopsis: Jason Lee plays a well-intentioned Everyman who is forced into a life of crime in STEALING HARVARD. Engaged to the beautiful Elaine (Leslie Mann) and saving up to buy their dream house, John (Lee)... Jason Lee plays a well-intentioned Everyman who is forced into a life of crime in STEALING HARVARD. Engaged to the beautiful Elaine (Leslie Mann) and saving up to buy their dream house, John (Lee) appears to have it all. But when his sister shows him a videotape in which he promises to pay for his niece's college education, he finds himself desperate for thirty thousand dollars. Recruiting his slightly psychopathic friend Duff (Tom Green) to help him come up with some fast cash, John quickly discovers that he's only making things worse for himself. After a bumbled mini-mart hold-up and a house burglary gone terribly wrong, John's descent into a life of crime takes even more outrageous turns for the worse. After he eventually comes clean with Elaine, she hatches a plan to rob her father's (Dennis Farina) home healthcare business. As the trio breaks into the Homespital offices, a maniacal police detective (John C. McGinley) and Elaine's father both make their move. Former Kids in the Hall member-turned-director Bruce McCulloch, working from an outlandish script from Peter Tolan (ANALYZE THIS, WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM?), gets solid performances out of his three leads, in addition to supporting players McGinley, Farina, and Richard Jenkins. [More]
Starring: Jason Lee, Tom Green, Leslie Mann, Dennis Farina
Starring: Jason Lee, Tom Green, Leslie Mann, Dennis Farina, Megan Mullally, Richard Jenkins, John C. McGinley, Chris Penn, Seymour Cassel
Director: Bruce McCulloch
Director: Bruce McCulloch
Screenwriter: Peter Tolan
Producer: Susan Cavan
Composer: Christophe Beck
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Reviews for Stealing Harvard
It's no-win stuff. It's not offensive enough to appeal to Green's (ever-decreasing) fan-base, nor witty enough to convince anyone else.
This film tries so hard to be both charming and disgusting that it's almost painful to watch.
Mafia films, westerns, pirate films, and now Comedies. These are the genres that are rapidly going extinct in the movie world.
Director Bruce McCulloch tries to minimize the damage Green does, but even one frame of him would be too much.
Among the squandered supporting cast are Dennis Farina, Chris Penn, Megan Mullally, and Seymour Cassel.
McCulloch stages his action as if he were still working on the two-walled sets he knew from Canadian television.
There is no real reason to see this unless you are related to someone involved in the project, and even then you might think pretty hard before you spend $9 and 90 minutes here.
Stealing Harvard is a limp and lazy affair, and a flick that positively reeks of contractual obligation.
You'll just have your head in your hands wondering why Lee's character didn't just go to a bank manager and save everyone the misery.
The result is a corps of good actors stuck with feeble, unfunny material that could easily pass as a crime against the moviegoing public.
I suppose as long as there are teenage boys to shell out money for movie tickets, there will be movies like this to suck it up.
There's a funny movie trapped somewhere inside Stealing Harvard, but the finished product offers only fleeting glimpses of it.
The film is like a series of beginnings and middles that never take off.
There’s just enough to Stealing Harvard to prevent it from being the worst movie of the year. But the few things that this movie has going for it have nothing to do with Tom Green.
Harvard and neices have nothing to do with this movie, it's just an excuse for 90 minutes of jokes
Seemingly a vehicle to showcase the Canadian’s inane ramblings, Stealing Harvard is a smorgasbord of soliloquies about nothing delivered by the former Mr. Drew Barrymore.
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