I Love You, Beth Cooper

This reviewer only wrote one sentence in his notebook tonight. It said - optimistically - "at least I Love You, Beth Cooper's title demonstrates the correct usage of a comma." Beyond grammatical accuracy though, there's very little to recommend here.

Maybe it was the casting of Alan Ruck that sealed its fate. Once upon a time, in a wild tale about high school partying, Ruck played the buddy of teenage superhero Ferris Bueller. 23 years later, the actor is cast here as a father figure forced to watch a bunch of kids do the exact same thing. Pity we, the audience, have to as well. I Love You, Beth Cooper has a lot of gags that have already been done a hundred times before, by movies that were much funnier.

The film's episodic nature doesn't help. Each scene features a group traveling from 'Point A' to 'Point B' and messing something up along the way. Even reliable actors like Hayden Panettiere and Paul Rust can't salvage a meaningful conversation from the script. Perhaps director Chris Columbus didn't give his actors enough room to improvise, or maybe he really has lost his sense of comic timing.

Whatever the reasons, I Love You, Beth Cooper is a derivative, crass and - perhaps worst of all - humourless genre picture.