Screeners From Hell: "Mac and Devin go to High School

“Mac and Devin go to High School”
Year: 2012
Director: Dylan C. Brown
Stars: Wiz Khalifa, Snoop Dogg, Mike Epps
Studio: Anchor Bay Films
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 75 Mins.

I’ve had to endure three really bad films in the two months; I thought it might be time to bring back “Screeners from Hell”. It’s the column, where I trash the worst of the worst. I couldn’t find a better movie than “Mac and Devin go to High School” to bring back this column.

The film is about a valedictorian (Wiz Khalifa), who struggling to pen his graduation speech, because he has no life experiences. He finds his inspiration in Mac Johnson (Snoop Dogg), an underachieving student who has been a senior in high school for fifteen years. Johnson becomes smitten when a new sexy substitute teacher arrives at the school. He begins to realize that the only chance he’ll have with her, if he graduates. He promises to help Devin cram four years of teenage experiences, if he’d help him graduate high in three weeks time.

There are some films, where you can’t help the fact that you’re watching a train wreck of a film. You want to shut the film off, but you still have to maintain your integrity as a reviewer and watch the film in its entirety. This was definitely the case with “Mac and Devin go to High School”.

I don’t know where to start. The directing was flat out horrible. Director Dylan C. Brown doesn’t attempt to do anything to make this film work. One of the things that I didn’t like about his direction, he goes for more of a music video style and just stay there for the entire film. From the way the film was shot to the animation of the narration sequences, this film felt like a seventy-five minute music video. It felt like something that you would see on MTV than in a normal movie theater. I wished Brown cut back on the music video style, because it was getting annoying by the half hour mark. The other thing that I strongly disliked about Brown’s direction, the way that he handles the acting. It was horrible. The acting was so flat and very one dimensional. This film felt like a bunch of friends that were there to have fun and not worrying about putting in decent performance. When that happens, it makes for a very long movie.

The screenplay isn’t much better. Screenwriters Herschel Faber, Jamieson Stern and Jarrett Golding were just flat out horrible. There’s way too much vulgar, sexual dialogue and scenes of characters smoking weed. By focusing on that a lot, there’s no time to develop the characters and film’s story. The other thing that the screenwriters didn’t do was create humorous moments. I was sitting there playing with my hands the entire time, because the scene weren’t funny. You need funny dialogue or action to generate laughs. There’s wasn’t any here, as it felt like they were using the dialogue scenes to set up for the next music video sequence. In short, the screenplay was uninteresting and unfunny.

“Mac and Devin go to High School” feels more like a long music video than a feature film. If you’re looking to laugh out loud, then you’re in the wrong place. That’s why “Mac and Devin go to High School” is a “Screener from Hell”.