Baywatch was an utter disappointment that night.

Three years ago American Pie set the standard for teen comedy. The question was could 'Slackers' surpass American Pie’s popularity?

By Neil Heath

The answer is not quite, and that’s a shame because it started so well.

The plot
Dave (Sawa), Sam (Segel) and Jeff (Maronna) are scammers. They lied and cheated their way through High School and are continuing to do so through college.

However, the college oddball Ethan (Schwartzman) cottons on to their little scams and blackmails them. They have to either help Ethan win the heart of the gorgeous Angela (Prepon), or face expulsion from the college.

Jason Schwartzman as College weirdo Ethan.

So this begins their biggest scam yet, a seemingly impossible task, which is made even harder when Dave falls for Angela himself…

Review
The biggest problem with Slackers is that the funniest character isn’t in the film enough, and that’s Jason Schwartzman’s character Ethan.

Ethan is a six-toed weirdo verging on complete lunacy, for example his best friend is a doll made of Angela’s own hair. When he’s not in a scene you long for his presence.

He’s not exactly a hero; if you went to school with someone like Ethan you’d be giving him a wide berth of titanic proportions.

The star of 'Final Destination' Devon Sawa plays Dave.

But, he’s the most appealing character in the film, if he wasn’t in it, ‘Slackers’ would be incredibly flat.

The best bits of the film are broken up by the slushy romance between Dave and Angela, which is quite frankly rather dull.

The only explanation for the insertion of these scenes was probably to appeal to the girls, but even they would see those scenes as a convenient time to pop to the toilet.

So what could have been a very good film, turns out to be pretty flat, even though some of the scenes will make you laugh out loud.