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Drip "Taylor"

"Drillbit Taylor". It's one of those titles, like "Joe Dirt" or "Deuce Bigalow", that get applied to a one-joke comedy in the hope that laughs will fall out by virtue of the name alone. "Drillbit" - a tone-deaf would-be comedy about three high school wimps who hire Owen Wilson's titular loser as their bodyguard - feels like a bargain-basement knock-off of any number of teen movies. "My Bodyguard" comes-out-swinging to mind ("Drillbit" even features a cameo by "My Bodyguard" himself Adam Baldwin - amazingly Kevin Costner, or Matt Dillon for that matter, is nowhere to be found). But "Drillbit" lacks even the slightest inspiration to make it anything more than the sum of its rehashed parts.

Co-produced by Judd Apatow and co-written by Apatow-mainstay Seth Rogen, "Drillbit" introduces two high school freshmen that the film goes to great pains to make instant losers. In an opening phone conversation, we meet Wade (Nate Hartley, stick-thin, with young Anthony Michael Hall hair) and Ryan, who goes by the name of "T-Dog" and is played by Troy Gentile, who has twice played a young Jack Black ("Nacho Libre", " Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny"). It's not bad enough that these two are classically "how to we meet a girl" clueless, they are also instantaneously beset by a startlingly psychopathic bully named Filkins (played by the Cusackian Alex Frost, looking every bit his twenty-one years) and an even bigger loser named Emmit (David Dorfman, in an obvious ploy to get some McLovin).

The film, directed by Steven Brill, who helmed the equally unfunny Adam Sandler comedies "Mr. Deeds" and "Little Nicky", has virtually no comic timing and no ear for dialogue. It doesn't help that its main characters are blatant knock-offs of Jonah Hill and Michael Cera from "Superbad". Though Mr. Hartley possesses some of Anthony Michael Hall's sympathetic geekiness, Mr. Gentile is simply super-bad. And, Mr. Dorfman's Emmit is so under-realized that he never quite gels; it almost seems as though his lines are dubbed by an even bigger geek.

And despite all this, it's hard to say what hurts more. Seeing Apatow-better-half Leslie Mann slumming it as Lisa, a ditzy high school teacher who sets the course of female characters back decades, or seeing 80s teen movie deity John Hughes rumored to be one of the film's co-writers (it's no wonder he chose to go by the pseudonym Edmond Dantes). The film is otherwise co-written by Mr. Rogen and Kristofor Brown, who worked together on Mr. Apatow's TV series "Undeclared". The film is shameless in its pilfering, going so far as to play the "Cape Fear" theme during a close-up of Filkins. There are also nods to "Risky Business", "Porky's", "The Breakfast Club", and any number of teen comedies. But none of it holds together. The film hopes to cash in on Mr. Wilson's inherent charisma. But Drillbit isn't much of a character. He's just another man-boy (like Mr. Wilson's similarly grating "Dupree" from 2006's "You, Me and Dupree") looking for love in all the wrong places. If you see "Drillbit Taylor", you're looking for comedy in an equally poor location.