It was tough, as a reviewer, to see a movie called "Loser." The title cleverly puts its audience in a merciful mood, setting them to search for redeeming qualities. I found it hard to retain my critical objectivity -- after all, who wants to be the bully that kicks a loser when it's down?
As it turns out, I do.
At nearly every turn, "Loser" proves that it is all too aptly named. Jason Biggs' character comes from a small town in the midwest, and he has been accepted on full academic scholarship to a college in New York. Mena Suvari is an eccentric young woman, low on self-esteem but high on street smarts.
Stock types like these old gems are OK, almost expected, in teen movies, but if you're going to go with a stereotype, you have to commit to it, or you just have bland. Biggs is a case in point. His character is certainly of the clumsy-but-likeable type you'd expect, but he's really not a "loser" to anybody but his scheming, roofie-toting roommates.
He has a great deal of self-confidence, not kicking himself for his social ineptitude like a good teen movie loser should, but instead continuing on with a smile. He barely blinks when a classmate tells him that "nobody likes you." He's certainly an admirable guy, but remember, we're supposed to be feeling sorry for him, not wishing we were more like him.
And despite his slight awkwardness, Biggs comes up short in the misfortune category. The two main conflicts of the story are supposed to be, in order of importance, Biggs has to get the girl, and he has to get a good grade in his European Lit class to keep his GPA up and stay in school. Any tension that might result from the latter conflict is negated by the prominently featured fact that Biggs can drop the Lit class at any time and still satisfy his credit requirements.
We are left with the boy-meets-girl issue. Unless director Amy Heckerling tried to pioneer new ground in teen filmmaking, this part of the story has to follow a well-established pattern of: boy falls in love, girl shows some interest in boy, boy makes mistake (or girl mistakenly perceives mistake) that angers the girl, girl gets over it and realizes what a sweetie boy is, happily ever after. The way in which a teen movie travels this path is what makes it interesting despite its predictability.
But not only is "Loser" more predictable than normal, it doesn't even make the effort to instill the traditional structure (or any structure to speak of) in its plot. From the moment they meet, Suvari and Biggs share a mutual affection that is never truly endangered throughout the course of the film. Even when Suvari thinks that Biggs has used her in a blackmailing scheme, she shows little disdain for him. The story construction is as half-hearted as the writing of the characters.
It is clear that the essential difficulty for Biggs is that he's enamored with Suvari and is having trouble taking their already healthy friendship to the next level. Oh, the unspeakable horror! Pardon me while I dry my tears.
Suvari has her own set of unconvincing woes. She's involved in an affair with the professor of her and Biggs' Lit class, an uncompromisingly arrogant fellow played by Greg Kinnear.
The problem with Suvari's character is that she frequently demonstrates what an independent thinker she is, often even ridiculing the academic notions of her professor "boyfriend." This type of person isn't the one to fall into a dependency on the self-important control freak that Kinnear plays. While Suvari plays the part well, it's written with too many contradictions and inexplicable devices.
There are a few cute moments. Great comics are wasted in all-too-short cameos, including appearances by David Spade and Andy Dick. And a scene parodying the classic fountain montage in "The Graduate" is charmingly executed, although I got a bigger laugh when "American Pie" did it.
A stereotypical teen movie can be made entertaining if it's done with the right tone, as the aforementioned "American Pie" did last year. If you're not going to follow the Hollywood norms, you have to do something new convincingly enough that I don't miss the comfort of the old standards. "Loser," true to its title, does neither.
