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50While Stealing Harvard may be a chucklehead comedy, Lee is oddly touching and funny. Mostly because, unlike Green, he's not aggressively trying to make us laugh.
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50Had Stealing Harvard merely been a stupid movie about people stuck in a string of silly moments, it could have gotten by on charm. As written by Peter Tolan and directed by Bruce McCulloch (''Kids in the Hall'') it's a stupid movie about stupid people.
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50Whenever Green shows up to do his semi-improvised, non-acting shtick (detaching pit bulls from testicles, kamikaze wheelchair rides, etc.), this otherwise sprightly and intermittently amusing movie suddenly feels like a ship dragging its anchor.
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50Together, Mr. Lee and Mr. Green have a daft comic energy, and they are assisted by game performances from the rest of the cast.
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50No one in a McCulloch movie is ever normal -- most of the humor comes from characters saying or doing the weirdest thing you could possibly come up with in any given circumstance, and if that kind of humor's your bag, there's frequently a lot to enjoy in the bizarre antics of Green and Jason Lee,
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40After watching this movie, you get the feeling that there’s a lot of people at Harvard who’ve done worse things than rob a bank to get in.
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40Lee's understated performance is a small treat.
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38Some actors steal scenes. Tom Green just gives them a bad odor. This self-infatuated goofball is far from the only thing wrong with the clumsy comedy.
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38When the most notable thing a film offers is the sight of Dennis Farina in drag, you can't expect much.
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38A few early laughs scattered around a plot as thin as it is repetitious. There's talent in this picture, both before and behind the camera, but virtually none of it gets on the screen.
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38Like Adam Sandler's "Mr. Deeds," this is a hybrid, hipster-cornball movie that wants to celebrate common folk but unapologetically uses words like "trailer trash" to describe them.
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33Working with a weak script and too lightweight for its freakier moments with Green, the picture never gels. Green's the star, but he really should be in a movie much weirder than this one, a film that can accommodate his humor.
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30Two idiots embark on a life of crime to help a deserving teenager attend Harvard in this lowbrow but generally sweet-natured comedy.
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25It has no edge, no hunger to be better than it is. It ambles pleasantly through its inanity, like a guest happy to be at a boring party.
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25The question is, how did the producers get the amiable, talented Jason Lee to Boogie Board down the toilet with (Green)?
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25Stinks even by the standards of late summer movie garbage.
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25What we have is the case of a movie with a straight man (Jason Lee) who really is funny, but with a comic (Tom Green) who sadly isn't.
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25It doesn't help that most of the jokes (like a rip-off of ''There's Something About Mary'''s dog-in-the-crotch bit) are themselves stolen.
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25Rarely has paper-casting worked as dismally as it does for Jason Lee and Tom Green.
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20An uncomfortable-looking Lee soldiers doggedly through a thankless role, while Green, though never particularly funny, at least brings off-kilter energy to a role that provides Stealing Harvard's only spark of spontaneity.
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20Depressingly thin and exhaustingly contrived. Only masochistic moviegoers need apply.
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20Here's the best thing about Stealing Harvard: A dog bites Green in the crotch for a really long time. Priceless.
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20Director Bruce McCulloch, an alumnus of the Canadian TV show "The Kids in the Hall," lacks the sense of scale and timing needed for a feature film, and Lee's voice-over about fate that brackets the narrative only highlights its shapelessness.
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10It's so bad that you have to wonder whether Tom Green was looking for a project to match last year's "Freddy Got Fingered" -- Green didn't direct this turkey, but it surely is a contender for the bottom of the barrel award for 2002.
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0With all the wrong Stealing Harvard has done, it at least bestows one gift upon its audience: the gift of forgettableness.