The premise of 'School for Scoundrels' is simple enough. Take your average loser with no athletic or social skills, enroll him in a confidence-boosting class, toss in an ensemble of goofy sidekicks, stir and watch the results. In the first half this movie promises to be a simple, funny-in-a-stupid-way comedy, but soon turns into a muddled mess of a film that falls into the trap of trying to mean something.
The movie centers around Roger, a young parking enforcement officer played by Jon Heder. You may remember Heder from the summer of 2004's most overrated movie that wasn't 'Garden State:'A_ 'Napoleon Dynamite.'A_ Billy Bob Thornton plays Doctor P, who runs a school which, for only $5,000, teaches confidence and women-snarin' techniques. This could work, but it fails before too long. Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile"") fails as a big army-eqsue stereotype, and even Horatio Sanz and ""Best Week Ever"" panelist Paul Scheer are turned into cartoons with lame, self-deprecating one-liners.
The same applies to the female characters in the movie. With Roger's next-door love interest, Amanda, we're supposed to believe that beautiful Australian girls fall for awkward, panicking nerds and suave, old-enough-to-be-their-dad doctors, merely by falling into Doc P's clich'd tactics.
Doc P beats it into his student's heads that 'people like him run shit and people like them eat shit,'A_ and then lets them in on his lessons of love and secrets to scoring which include 'no compliments: ever, 'lie, lie and lie some more' and the old male-as-lion/female-as-prey metaphor. Ladies, I'll spare you and disclose no more.
When Doc P starts going after Amanda, things go from bad to worse. Although Heder doesn't rely too strongly on his 'Dynamite' character, it's not enough to give the impression that anything is at stake except for who's the bigger Alpha Dog. Due to director Todd Phillips and the writer's failure to decide on what type of movie 'School For Scoundrels'A_ should be, it falls into ridiculousness and predictability without much of a fight.
