It's gotta be a real spirit-breaker when you get denied by every college you've applied to. This is the situation facing high school senior Bartleby Gaines in the academic comedy Accepted. After receiving his eighth rejection letter in a row, Bartleby is about ready to throw in the towel and live an average life determined by his average grades. But Bartleby wants to appease his disappointed parents, so with a handful of friends, he helps cook up the South Harmon Institute of Technology, a phony school designed to fool his folks into thinking he's a college boy.

There's just one teensy problem: the fake school's realistic website has attracted hundreds of applicants who also got turned away by other colleges. Now Bartleby (Justin Long) is forced to organize the students, come up with a campus, and hire an irate shoe salesman (Lewis Black) to play the dean. In the process, Bartleby discovers how much he and the others at South Harmon learn when education is left up to them.

Accepted is being released in theatres at just the right time, in the weeks before recent high school graduates head off for their first year of college. However, if you're looking to this film for any nuggets of wisdom or intelligent dialogue that highlight some of the more noticeable flaws in America's educational system, then it's about time to have your official moviegoer's card revoked. Accepted plays its story strictly for laughs, and unless you haven't seen a single college-oriented comedy in the last twenty years, it's not offering up anything really new in that department. It's a gentle-hearted comedy with a goofy head on its shoulders and a bawdy sense of humor reminiscent of a scaled-down version of the college comedies spawned from the success of National Lampoon's Animal House. But once you've seen one of these movies, you've seen them all, and Accepted is no exception.

Aside from Black's small but hilarious supporting role as South Harmon's "dean," a guy who delivers beer-fueled sermons to the students on a consistent basis, Accepted is fairly dry in terms of laughs, since the script is lacking in wit and pumps out a steady stream of tired physical humor. The story is predictable to a fault, essentially coming across as a "grown-up" version of a '90s comedy titled Camp Nowhere (which featured teens running rampant in their own homemade summer camp), treading across well-worn cinematic territory. By the time the film gets to the inevitable sequence where Bartleby will have to prove South Harmon's worth to the Big Bad Education Board, don't be surprised if you find yourself having tuned out long beforehand. 

Although this movie is not without some merit (there's Black's gut-busting turn, and Justin Long plays an appealing enough lead), I can't help wondering why studios think moviegoers still consider wheezy genre standards like the preppy bully, the geeky fat kid, and inhuman campus deans to be fresh and original concepts.

Accepted is goofy and harmless, and you could do a lot worse as far as comedies go. But that also means you could do better, as well, since revisiting movies like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, films that set off the college comedy trend in the first place, would be more fulfilling. 

MY RATING: ** (out of ****)

(Released by Universal Pictures and rated "PG-13" for language, sexual material and drug content.)