Accepted (2006)

Originally Reviewed

Saturday November 18, 2006

What happens to all those misfit high-school students who get rejected by every college they apply to? Well according to this film they all start their own college... I guess they forgot about option B, community college which is 90% cheaper and you get all the stupid classes you are forced to take in your first two years without shelling out a lot of dough. Of course all these guys are too stupid to realize that which is why they got rejected in the first place!

Bartleby Gaines and his friends have all been rejected by the colleges of their choice, all except Bartleby's best friend Sherman whose only reason for getting accepted to Harmon College was because of his family's connections. Unable to stand the disappointment and discouragement of his parents any longer Bartleby decides to create a fake acceptance letter from a fake college in hopes of giving him a little more time to get accepted somewhere. To convince his father that this is a real college Bartleby enlists the help of his reluctant friend Sherman to design a legitimate looking website in hopes of pulling off his scam. Then things begin to go terribly wrong...

His father buys the scam and presents him with a check for $10,000 for his first semester of tuition, and then tells him he can't wait to see his college when he drops him off. To keep this charade going Bartleby must now try and come up with a legitimate looking college within a short amount of time. While cutting it close Bartleby and friends are able to throw together something "halfway" convincing to get their parents off their backs but things are only beginning to get worse. When hundreds of "accepted" students begin showing up at their doors with tuition checks Bartleby doesn't know what to do, as it seems Sherman literally made "Acceptance a Click Away" on the school's fake website.

With hundreds of rejected students just like him, over a million dollars in tuition money at their grasps and no where else to go or do, Bartleby decides to make a go of it and see if they can really pull the South Harmon Institute of Technology off as a legitimate school. At least until Harmon College figures out what is going on and attempts to take them all down!

Accepted is your typical teen comedy toned down by a minimal amount. It finds comedy in the most ridiculous things and then never lets them go, quite like the school's monogram being a curse word, something the movie constantly brings up and quickly begins to grow old. While the film is rated PG-13 the use of the S-word probably adds up to around 50 times, so I'm not entirely sure why the use of the F-word twice would warrant an R-rating yet using it only once and cursing up a storm with the other words is okay. Seems like the rating system is a little off base.

That aside the film is pretty average in terms of entertainment, the characters are extremely cookie cutter and have been done before hundreds of times. The idea of creating a college and the whole charade was a little different and interesting for a while but soon even that began it get pretty old. In the end, Accepted is another one of those brainless teen films that gets thrown into the melting pot of teen film history never to be remembered again. It's slightly entertaining for a one-time viewing but most people won't care to watch it again, if they even remember it exists. 

 5/10