‘Graduation’ fails with flying colors
High school graduation can be a defining moment for those students walking across the stage with diploma in hand. That diploma is the key to opening certain doors in the lives of those graduates.
“Graduation” should have been held back a few years until it was taught to be a decent movie.
Two weeks before graduation, a cliché foursome of friends — the jock, the jock’s girl, the guy who wants the jock’s girl and the pierced, odd-hair-color outcast — decide robbing a bank is the best way to help one of the group.
Polly (Shannon Lucio) is the only female in the circle of friends, and her father is conveniently the president of the bank the group plans to rob.
Through improbable combinations of plans that somehow come together in the end, the four friends execute a bank robbery.
The no-logic-or-plot-necessary approach to film-making in Hollywood shines bright with the collection of actors from TV shows on the CW (formerly known as the WB). In an attempt to add some element of drama to a bland screenplay, the writers decided to add a hostage situation to the movie that mirrors the over-acted drama of a too long for TV episode of “The O.C.”
Chris Marquette had the most convincing portrayal as Carl, the friend in need who gets the other three main characters involved in a bank robbery to pay for his mother’s hospital bills.
Save your tissues to clean the sick off your mouth, not your tears. If viewers are able to manage the first half of the movie that has no direction, they are in for a real treat when the final credits roll and they realize the pain of yet another teen movie played by actors in their late 20s has finally ended.
The direct-to-DVD movie was the third movie by director Mike Mayer, but his first movie longer than 15 minutes. Maybe he could have kept audiences more entertained if he stuck with his previous short-film style.
The producers of the film did make wise choices when deciding to lace the movie with songs from The Decemberists, Bloc Party and Iggy Pop and the Stooges.
To save money in the declining economy, it is not economical to spend money renting “Graduation” when the movie can be watched on basic cable TV, just under a different name. Check your local listings for any cliché high school television drama to fill any hankering “Graduation” might fulfill.
Rating: F
—Brian Schroeder
Staff Writer
