I went into Drillbit Taylor with lowered expectations. I missed the movie during its March theatrical release, but had read the negative-trending reviews. The failed suicide attempt of Owen Wilson cast a shadow over things, certainly, making for an awkward sell with the public, given that its famously wry and sunny, butterscotch lead couldn’t or didn’t fully press the flesh on the movie’s behalf. The result was a $32 million domestic shrug. The truth is, though, Drillbit Taylor quite plainly doesn’t work on its own terms. A comedy that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a movie about high school essentially for adults (see: Election) or a slapstick-y farce for kids, it’s about five percent inspiration and 95 percent downhill coasting. Actually, make that about 90 percent coasting, and five percent Steven Brill suckitude. I’d forgot how bad of a director he really is.

Written by Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen, who met on Judd Apatow’s Undeclared, Drillbit Taylor centers around three freshmen with varying levels of geekiness — Wade (Nate Hartley), Ryan (Troy Gentile, above left), or “T-Dog,” as he insists on being called, and Emmit (David Dorfman, above bottom right) — who end up as targets for bully Terry (Alex Frost), an emancipated minor who has the school’s principal (Stephen Root) convinced of the sincerity of his “welcoming hazing.” Pooling their financial resources, the kids hire whom they think to be an ex-military specialist turned bodyguard, a guy who name-drops Sylvester Stallone and Bobby Brown as former clients.

In reality, though, Drillbit (Wilson) is a homeless dude loafing it in Santa Monica, showering on the beach and looking for the next scratch-off lottery ticket payday that will score him a plane ticket to British Columbia, where he inexplicably wants to move. So at first Drillbit looks merely to take the kids for a ride, taking their meager cash offering and raiding Wade’s home for items he can pawn. A few of his homeless pals, though, convince him to milk the situation for further benefit, and eventually the kids and their plight start to matter to Drillbit. Wan advice morphs into a more hands-on approach, which culminates with a massive showdown at a party thrown by Terry.

There’s the potential here for a coarse, Bad Santa-type romp, but the edges are all sanded down to yawning, test audience-approved memes and lessons, never mind the (theatrical release) restrictions of a PG-13 rating. A couple love interests are crammed in — Wade swoons for classmate Brooke (Valerie Tian), while Drillbit hooks up with a teacher played by Leslie Mann, producer Apatow’s wife — to negligible effect, and gaping holes of illogicality (in a bit lazily nipped from School of Rock, Drillbit winds up as a substitute teacher, somehow heading up a variety of classes) pepper the movie’s second and third acts.

I waited with anticipation for the arrival of bit player Danny McBride, who helped make Hot Rod a hoot, what with his belligerent energy and bizarr-o proclamations (“This is my hat now — totally my hat!”), but he first pops up 16 minutes into the movie and, though he serves as a sort of devil-on-shoulder and increasingly antagonistic figure to Drillbit, he never feels particularly well integrated into the proceedings. Not that he’s alone in that regard — the movie lurches about when asking audiences to consider the aforementioned female characters, or a parental meeting with the principal.

The film scores a few points when Rogen and Brown’s touch with cracked specificity pokes through the carefully crafted studio notes that make so much of the rest of the movie feel like a store-bought painting of dogs playing poker. The boys’ fate is cemented in savvy, silly fashion when Wade and Ryan wear the same, very distinctive shirt on the first day of school. There’s a freestyle-rap battle where Ryan slams Terry, and a bit where Drillbit shows the kids The Untouchables as evidence of the “hold-back” method, wherein one or two peers restrain a yapping-mad friend, who doesn’t really want to fight anyway. A motorist also scrawls “not for pot” on a handout to the panhandling Drillbit, explaining, “Now I bet you’ll feel really silly if you try to buy weed with that money.” Unfortunately, these inspired moments are few and far between, and director Brill (Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds), who can’t locate the pulse of a scene without resorting to static master shots, throws in plenty of tired physical gags in an inartful attempt to skew the energy of the piece.

Housed in a regular Amray case, this extended and unrated version Drillbit Taylor prolongs the unruly narrative in what seems like relatively pointless fashion (what great character insights are possibly gleaned?), but at least comes with a decent array of bonus features, starting with an audio commentary track featuring Brill, co-writer Brown and the three young leads. There’s a four-minute gag reel in which McBride is advised to lose the improvisational “ass” from a scene, Gentile accidentally pulls up some grass turf, Brill frequently shouts out lines, and Wilson is told, by a ringer kiddie extra, that “Vince Vaughn is much funnier than you.” As with most other Apatow-produced flicks, there’s also four minutes of “line-o-rama” excised material, the bulk of which is funnier than around 85 percent of what’s actually in the movie.

In addition to more deleted scenes, a clutch of five featurettes, ranging from three to six minutes, offer up specialized looks at Brill (who jokingly mock-punches his adolescent charges in the face) and McBride (who observes, “I play a homeless guy, but he has more clothes than I do in real life”), as well as Gentile’s training for the rap battle, a sequence involving a pulled fire safety sprinkler, and Frost and fellow screen bully Josh Peck. Finally, Rogen phones in from the set of another film for a 14-minute phone chat with co-writer Brown, in which they reminisce about a planned opening sequence, scratched for budgetary reasons, showing Drillbit’s military service in Iraq (“We should have just used footage from Behind Enemy Lines,” Rogen moans). There’s also talk about studio notes and other compromises large and small, before the whole thing devolves into a discussion about the recent Rambo sequel, which Rogen enthusiastically deems a “humanitarian wet dream.” Again, a
good portion of this chat is much more interesting than the actual finished product. Conspicuously absent in all the extras, though? Wilson himself. To purchase the film via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Vantage Point feels very much like what it is, which is to say a screenplay written by a television development executive turned debut screenwriter, in this case Barry L. Levy. A defanged political thriller in which much dry ice-manufactured fog is pumped around the “single truth” behind an assassination attempt on the president of the United States on foreign soil, the film unfolds over and over, from eight different points-of-view. Unfortunately, it’s so meticulous in its peddling of red herrings and inclusive in its conspiratorial underpinnings that it just becomes an exercise in tedium.

Set
in Salamanca, Spain, the story unfolds at a summit of world leaders at
which the American president (William Hurt) is set to unveil a bold new
anti-terrorist measure. Assigned to protect him are Secret Service
agents Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox)
and Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid, above left), the latter of whom is a recently
returned-to-work hero who’s already taken a bullet for his boss. When President Ashton is shot on stage in a large, public square, chaos
ensues. A bomb explodes outside the walled-off venue, and then another
larger explosion rips through the main platform. Among those present
are a reporter (Zoe Saldana), a local cop (Eduardo Noriega, above center), three
mysterious, whispering bystanders (Said Taghmaoui, Ayelet Zurer and Domino‘s Edgar Ramirez) and an American tourist, Howard (Forest Whitaker), who thinks he might have captured the shooter on his camcorder while videotaping the event for his kids back home.

Vantage Point — whose trailer can be glimpsed here — is an enterprise hamstrung from early on,
and thus its faults can be traced quite easily and non-fussily back to
the major cornerstones (writing and directing) of its rendering. The movie’s conceit affords the audience an aerial view of matters, but there’s no significant investigative mooring
(apart from two bits that Barnes glimpses in camera footage, which
apparently tells him everything he needs to know) to make the
actual forward-push of the narrative matter.

Director Pete Travis has previous experience with political violence; his debut film, 2005’s Omagh,
focused on the search for justice after a 1998 bombing in Northern Ireland, and picked up a few
festival prizes, though no Stateside distribution. Here, though, he’s
given a script that substitutes
whiz-bang car chases and cheap emotional gambits (a child imperiled,
standing in the middle of a busy road) in place of anything slightly
more interesting. That means, as the movie wears on, more and more jittery, Bourne-style-lite mayhem, with edits every one-half to one-third a second.

Vantage Point is essentially a single, episodic set piece of an episode of 24, stretched like taffy into a mad-dash exercise in button-pushing exploit-ainment.
The air-quote explanation of the entire plot basically distills down to
the line, “This war will never end,” which is offered up in a raspy,
death-rattle confession by one of the complicit terrorists. The
motivation (religious fanaticism? political disenfranchisement?
old-fashioned greed?) is never really explained, though we’re led to
believe it’s perhaps elements of all of these, as well as… blackmail?
Sorry, that just doesn’t pass the smell test.

To render all this carnage in PG-13 strokes seems additionally ludicrous,
and requires that Travis and editor Stuart Baird cut away from and
otherwise “stunt” (including a slight, stuttering-frame effect) more
than a dozen gunshots that are by implication lethal. Poor Dennis Quaid
tries, and is as much of an anchoring presence as the story will allow.
Vantage Point, though, has no unifying vision of purpose — either of its own, or the world at its center.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Vantage Point‘s DVD includes both widescreen and full screen versions of the film, plus a bonus digital copy for playback on PSP, PlayStation 3 or PCs. A trailer of the forthcoming Hancock automatically plays upon start-up, and other special features on the DVD include a genial and very informative audio commentary track with director Travis, as well as a deleted scene and a mock-serious “surveillance tape” which is actually a 40-second clip of Travis entering a room and discharging an ammo clip, in theory to show how he’d like the scene staged.

The biggest supplemental inclusion comes by way of a 27-minute making-of featurette, which includes interviews with most of the principal cast and crew, as well as producer Callum Greene. Though this segment sometimes needlessly dips into an affected fake video style, it does pack in a fair amount of information (e.g., Sigourney Weaver‘s character, a television news director, was originally written as a man, hence the name “Rex,” which they kept), along with all the expected back-slapping self-congratulation. There’s also a separate interview with screenwriter Levy, and a seven-minute look at the movie’s stunt work and effects, in which stunt director Spiro Razatos talks about the 15 cameras used to capture the big explosion, and the challenges of filming a car chase in Mexico City’s very narrow streets — especially when “closed for filming” doesn’t fully translate, south of the border. For another clip from the movie, click here. To purchase the film via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. D+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)