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Drillbit Taylor
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: March 25, 2008

Owen Wilson doesn't seem to give a damn whether he saves his new film from its own unfunniness... which was maybe the only way to save it. One can imagine a comedy superstar like Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler taking the Drillbit Taylor screenplay and whirlygigging it into something manic and desperate. But Wilson, who is not a comedian so much as he is an effortlessly funny person, has taken material that offers NO laughs and made it watchable and mildly amusing. It's an odd sort of accidental triumph for the star, who inexplicably attempted suicide last year. No one's going to call this a good film. But it is a good, even heroic, performance from Owen Wilson.

Meanwhile, Drillbit Taylor is a giant step backwards for the troupe that includes Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan. These guys have been on a roll lately with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad. But this time, they deal rather clumsily with the theme of high school bullying and the stress it puts on teenagers. Given the epidemic of high school shootings in this country, and the role that bullying plays in setting these tragedies in motion, the filmmakers owed us something insightful or at least something cathartically funny. But Drillbit Taylor falls well short of any such inspirations. Furthermore, the film's villain, a high school senior named Filkins, is just plain scary, right up to the moment when he flings a sword into a crowd at a party. This character is actually very well rendered... for a serious movie about dangerous teenagers. But for a supposed comedy, he casts too real a chill.

The plot concerns three nerdy high school freshman who hire a homeless army deserter to protect them from the above-mentioned psychopath, Filkins. The joke, of course, is that the bodyguard is even more of a fraidy-cat (and more of a child) than the kids he's protecting. Fans of Superbad will notice immediately that the kids in this movie are nowhere near as brilliant the three heroes of that far-superior film. I feel bad picking on these young actors after all the humiliation I just watched them endure in the name of entertainment. I do offer them sincere encouragement in whatever day jobs they shouldn't quit. But to the filmmakers, I say: A lot of charm went right out the window in the casting sessions.

Wilson, on the other hand, is perfectly cast. Regardless of the film, this actor walks funny, and he talks funny. He even stands still and does nothing funny. He's like a Banzai tree of humor. When he's onscreen, Drillbit Taylor becomes magically tolerable. And in the handful of scenes he shares with the wonderful actress Leslie Mann, the film actually gets into gear and becomes good. It's really too bad the filmmakers insisted on keeping all the material with the adolecents, because the adults deliver the only genuinely memorable moments in Drillbit Taylor, and they are simply not given the screen time that they (and we) deserve.

More often, Drillbit Taylor offers upsetting depictions of verbal and physical abuse without any remotely resonant message about the pathology or consequences of bullying. And believe it or not, the film's conflicts are resolved finally with an elaborate sequence of beatings and pummelings. Here, as a writer, I find myself in serious danger of spewing hypocrisies. After all, I am not exactly a detractor of screen violence, and in real life, I do believe people sometimes require a punch in the nose... when nothing else will get through to them. On the other hand, no one punches anyone in the nose anymore; that's an old fashioned recourse. These days, when a conflict gets physical, people get beaten and kicked within an inch of their lives. More than ever, violence seems to be about destruction, as opposed to mere punishment. More than ever it is revealed to be a one way, dead end street.

As for screen violence, the subject deserves its own essay. In brief I would say it's not the sight of people in pain that elevates my adrenaline, but the drama inherent in situations where life, limb, and liberty are in jeopardy. A movie gets good when the stakes get high, and while this does not necessarily mean violent situations (for instance, the stakes are high in a good love story too) it does frequently involve flying bullets and fists and such. That said, a violent movie has to be good too, i.e. it has to say something about the human condition (or at least something about physics and motion.) Hence Apocalypse Now or even Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon make profundity of violence. Drillbit Taylor, not so much.

Finally, on the subject of bullying, some of you may have noticed I'm something of a bully myself. I use cruel words, and not cruel deeds, but the power trip is not so different, or more civilized, because, as I learned long ago in high school, nothing hurts like he truth. Nowadays I bully films and filmmakers and relish the mean-spirited chuckles of my peers. So I am not about to use this film review to denounce bullying as "not funny" or "not appropriate subject matter for a comedy." Drillbit Taylor is simply poorly executed, not wrongly conceived. As for my venomous heart, I may be a bully, folks, but I am more often enthusiastically supportive of artists and the arts. Even Matthew McConaughey deserves a pat on the back for sticking his neck out while others may not have the guts to do what they love and accept the results. And so I conclude by saying Drillbit Taylor is a feather in the cap for Owen Wilson, more so perhaps that an inspired film that might have propped him up with good material. He's high and dry in this one, and thoroughly charming anyway. We may never understand what led to his suicide attempt last year. But I hope he's on the other side of that crisis and back on the screen to stay, because he's a lot of fun to be around.

Copyright © 2008 Theo Michelfeld