Going into “General Education”, I was hoping I would have time with this film. This looked like the type of film that yours truly would enjoy. It feels old school and drew my interest because comedic actors Larry Miller and Jeanne Garofalo are involved with the project.
The film follows Levi Collins (Chris Sheffield), a kid who has a bright future and recently received a tennis scholarship to a local university. Only problem is, he failed Earth Science and can’t graduate. To make matters worse, he lied to his parents about it. Now Levi has the summer to retake the class before his parents find out. To make matters worse, he keeps getting preoccupied with a tennis tournament, an annoying menace and a budding romance with a classmate. Can Levi find a way to pass the class, before he ends up repeating his senior year?
I was hoping to enjoy this film, because this looked like my type of comedy film. The first fifteen minutes was good, but this film goes on a freefall after that. “General Education” is one of those films that falls flat on its face.
Most of that has to do with Tom Morris’s direction. One of the things that I didn’t like about it, the acting felt flat. The reason for that were the performances. He doesn’t do a good job getting some personality out of his cast. The acting felt very dull. I was sitting and thinking about how I didn’t like these characters. I was hoping for good performances here from the main cast. There was none of that. Morris doesn’t do a good job getting his cast motivated. It looked like they were there for a paycheck and didn’t care about most of the scenes. The other thing that I didn’t like about it was the way that he handles the direction of the film’s male antagonist. You could easily tell that he was overacting his part. It almost made turn off the film a couple of times, as the character was very annoying to the point that I was going to eject the disc. Morris doesn’t do anything to tone down the performance. It shows dearly, as the character is completely repetitive and redundant. I don’t mean to be this harsh on the performance, but this hurt the film.
The screenplay written by Morris, Elliot Field and Jaz Kalkat isn’t much better. I didn’t like the fact that the film’s main plot and subplots weren’t interesting and fun to watch. They didn’t do a good job with the way that set up the situations that the main character encounters. They felt very bland and there wasn’t anything that made any of the scenes stand out. In comedy films, you need scenes to stand out and let the audience have a fun time. I got none of that here, as the writers didn’t do anything for me to enjoy this film. The other problem was there just weren’t enough funny scenes or lines to grab my interest. This was a hard film to laugh. There were only a couple of funny moments, but I felt very bored watching this film. The reason for that, the situations the character was in felt repetitive and dull. After a while, it became redundant and I was not having a good time.
“General Education” is one of those films that you wish the characters were entertaining and there were funny scenes to go along with that. I really hate giving this film one star, but there were too many things wrong with it.
Review Rating: One Star
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