Bill Wine reviews ‘Drillbit Taylor’

Bully for this bully comedy?

Nope. But at least young victims of school bullies now have a movie to point to that’s purportedly telling their sad/funny story.

Three freshmen — Ryan (Troy Gentile), Wade (Nate Hartley), and Emmit (David Dorfman) — are hassled on their first day of high school by Filkins, the psychopathic school bully (Alex Frost) whose mission in life is to sniff out dorks and do them harm.

By the second day, however… things get even worse. And will obviously continue to as the curriculum now features daily beatings and humiliations. So, in need of protection, they place an ad for a personal bodyguard in Soldier of Fortune magazine.

They get a response from the title character, played by Owen Wilson, who claims that he’s a soldier of outrageous you-know-what who just happens, at the present time, to be homeless. He’s an army deserter with hand-to-hand combat skills, he says, that are invisible but idiosyncratic and imposing.

Hey, if this guy can do to his opponents what he does to the truth, why, there will be some serious damage inflicted.

Best of all, of course, is that the price is right — that is, he comes cheap. That is, until he begins to remove valuable items from the kids’ homes that he says might come in handy as props and weapons.

As the revenge-of-the-nerds training begins for the trio of hapless high school victims, Drillbit, as part of his plan to infiltrate the school, masquerades as a substitute teacher, inadvertently bringing a number of his “home-free” friends with him.

That’s how he meets English teacher Leslie Mann (real-life wife of producer and comedy honcho Judd Apatow), who is drawn to him immediately as a potential Mr. Wrong, as is her wont.

Steven Brill (Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds, Without a Paddle) directs this schoolyard fantasy as if it were a third cousin of Superbad: The structure is similar, as is the array of characters, who are freshmen this time rather than seniors.

But the script lacks Superbad’s coherence — we could, not without reason, just call it Justplainbad — and the level of acting lacks self-assurance and measured skill: Brill never gets his inexperienced young actors to settle into their roles and stop trying to wring laughs from the audience. Instead, he depends on the semi-improvisational talents of Owen Wilson to carry the load. Which would be fine, except that he disappears for long stretches.

The end result is two movies — one about the three frosh and one about their con-artist savior — that neither complement each other nor interconnect in the way that they should. The slapstick set pieces generate a few laughs, but not enough to distract us from the severe limitations of the lazily, arbitrarily written screenplay: This is a high school? On what planet?

Seth Rogen, the star of Knocked Up and the co-writer (as a kid) of Superbad, was one of the screenwriters. Another was John Hughes — yep, that John Hughes, the blast-from-the-past writer-director among whose troubled-high-schoolers comedies were Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, and Sixteen Candles.

But the final screenplay seems cobbled together from several not-necessarily-compatible versions. Which is why we’ll protect just 2 stars out of 4 for Drillbit Taylor.

Kids — especially if bullies are part of their universe, and where isn’t that true? — will have to drill a bit, but they’ll find a few chuckles. A few. But, like the three boys in distress, they’re small and they’re weak and they need help.

This movie is in theaters starting today, March 21.