Drillbit Taylor (2008)

A 2008 coming-of-age comedy from the Apatow factory, directed by Steven Brill and carrying a story credit from John Hughes under a pseudonym, which lends the proceedings a faint air of a master's parting gift that nobody asked for. Three freshmen hire a bodyguard to fend off a sociopathic bully and get instead a homeless grifter played by Owen Wilson at his most languid. The film's cultural inventory is remarkably sparse. The cast is white to a degree that borders on the geological, with minority faces appearing only in passing. Women exist as a romantic interest and a teacher who enters a sexual relationship with the lead, and the script has no opinion about any of it. There is no environmental sermon, no reckoning with capital, no meditation on the body, no neurodivergent interiority, and no historical revision of any kind. The bullying is rendered as slapstick, not as a platform.

What the film does possess is a certain meanness, noted by critics at the time, which it wears without apology. The bullies are cruel, the adults are useless, and the resolution arrives through a fistfight and a samurai sword. This is not moral instruction. It is vaudeville with a body count of one severed pinkie. One might expect a 2008 studio comedy about adolescent torment to reach for a lesson about kindness, and the fact that it declines is almost refreshing, though the freshness fades quickly.

The picture grossed $49.7 million against a $40 million budget and holds a 26 percent approval rating, which is the market's way of saying the vintage did not keep. Wilson charms. The chemistry holds. The screenplay does not. We are left with a document of its moment that documents almost nothing beyond the moment itself, which is its own kind of honesty. Score it accordingly. The cellar is warm.