'Underclassman' Flunks Out

Ah, "Underclassman." This has to be one of the least anticipated movies of the year, up there with "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo." If you saw the previews for this film and thought, "Hey, that looks delightful," then you are a bad person, and I blame you for being the reason that self-indulgent tripe like this is even made. For that is exactly what this movie is: self-indulgent tripe. This movie is 90 minutes of Nick Cannon's one-liners, fat jokes and funny faces (and of course I use the word "funny" facetiously). \nThe only thing worse than Nick Cannon's performance in this movie is the story, which apparently Nick Cannon helped write. It is completely without a moment of originality, and is so loaded with clichés that it isn't so much one bad movie, as it is a compilation of other bad movies that you've already seen and hated. In the story, Tracy "Tre" Stokes (Cannon) goes undercover at a rich high school to solve the murder of one of its students. While there he gets close to a prime suspect and social king pin Rob Donovan (X-men's Shawn Ashmore) mostly because Tre's "mad basketball skills" help the school's Street Ball team win against an archrival high school (apparently not one but all of the rich privileged private high schools in the L.A. area like to play their basketball games with "street rules"). Cue a montage of Cannon dancing around and bouncing the ball off of people's heads and catching alley oops for game-winning points. Of course, there is also a sexy Spanish teacher (Roselyn Sanchez) and a tough-but fair police chief (Cheech Marin) who is giving Tre his last chance to prove himself to be as good of a cop as his father was before he was killed in the line of duty. It is like a parody of a bad cop movie, only it isn't a parody, it is just a bad cop movie.\nThis movie isn't just bad, it is awful. As I watched it, my eyes kept trying to escape the torture and run off to the theater next door that was playing "Howl's Moving Castle." "No more of this crappy version of Chris Tucker," they would cry as I stuffed them back into their sockets. I guess there is one redeeming quality to this movie -- now I have concrete evidence to use against all the people who claim that Nick Cannon is funny.