THE NEW GUY
Not another teen movie! Please! Dizzy Harrison (DJ Qualls, about 99 pounds of
bone and nose) is a geek. He's tired of being tied up and attired in
faux tits, sick of getting his dick snapped into protractor-accurate
right angles by elderly librarians. He needs a tough new image, and a brand new
school, so DJ -- natch -- starts loitering at the local penitentiary, enlisting
inmate Luther (Eddie Griffin, mugging like the bastard child of Chris Tucker
and Dolemite) and some bad cops (shameless fraud Henry Rollins is one of 'em)
to show him how it's done. DJ gets expelled, he transfers, he learns an
important lesson about being true to himself, and blah blah blah. Does he wind
up with the popular girl (Eliza Dushku)? Does a principal shit in a stall?
Despite Ed Decter's manic comic-book direction, this flick plods slower than
an eighth-period study hall and has about as many laughs. And though Decter
thinks a string of gratuitous cameos (Vanilla Ice, Tommy Lee, Gene Simmons --
all of whom must be cash-poor) will enliven this listless crap fest, they do
not. He's even swallowed the comedic truism that dwarves are always good for a
chuckle. So when Lyle Lovett, who plays Dizzy's doofus dad and is about the
only decent thing in this whole sorry mess, gets a marshmallow inflammatorily
grafted to his eye socket, it's a tidy metaphor about what happens to good
people in bad movies. At the Apple Valley, Entertainment, Flagship, Holiday,
Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.
Issue Date: May 10 - 16, 2002
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