Bullied boys get a superbad bodyguard in 'Drillbit Taylor'
"Drillbit Taylor" sounds like a rediscovered blaxploitation movie or a name near the top of the NFL draft. It's just Owen Wilson's second comedy since it was reported last year that he tried to end his life. Now we have to look at that face and assume we can see sadness between the laugh lines. His stoned sunniness has lost its Teflon coating.
Wilson plays the title character, an Army deserter now homeless in Santa Monica. When three high-school freshmen (Nate Hartley, Troy Gentile, and David Dorfman), tired of being pushed around, place an ad looking for a bodyguard, Drillbit shows up, sensing an opportunity to grift, bilk, and purloin whenever he can. The kids take a cockeyed liking to his alleged military expertise and his bogus training methods. But as the bullying persists, they come to suspect he's a fraud. By that point the movie has already given in to its disturbing sadistic side.
Co-written by the actor Seth Rogen, this movie is like the last movie he co-wrote, "Superbad," about three nerds humiliated en route to a party. (Judd Apatow produced both.) This time, it's "Superbad" for ninth graders instead of seniors - "Superbaddish," I suppose.
Hartley and Gentile are to this movie what Michael Cera and Jonah Hill were to "Superbad": the skinny guy and his fat best friend. Dorfman is the sidekick figure who is somehow stranger than the other two. (He was Naomi Watts's creepy son in "The Ring" movies.) Gentile is brusque and sounds like he's from Brooklyn. Hartley has Joan Cusack's face and one of her haircuts. He's very good.
But isn't it too soon for retreads from Rogen and Apatow? The producer even throws in Leslie Mann, his wife, to do a version of the bitterly desperate woman routine she played to perfection in "Knocked Up." (She falls for Wilson here.) "Drillbit Taylor" isn't as obnoxious as "Superbad" (parts of it feel like Paul Mazursky's farce "Down and Out in Beverly Hills"), but it's just as overwrought an adolescent nightmare.
For a little while the bullying is pretty funny. Director Steven Brill oversees an ecstatic montage of soda being poured over laptops and kids being forced to urinate on each other. But once Gentile is strapped to a chair and shoved hard into a wall, it's apparent that we're well beyond wedgies. We're in horror-movie territory. The boys run for their lives, even after Drillbit shows up. And the bullies - played too convincingly by Alex Frost and Josh Peck - don't take him seriously, either.
The movie imagines this nice, safe, upper-middle-class school as the kind of urban war zone Michelle Pfeiffer and Hilary Swank have been sent to in movies past. The principal (Stephen Root) doesn't appear interested in stopping the violence, either. Any other school would put an end to this kind of ritual humiliation, if only to keep a Columbine-style retaliation off its hands. (Incidentally, Frost played one of the killers in Gus Van Sant's high-school-massacre movie, "Elephant." He does all the nasty acting here he couldn't in that film.)
The makers of "Drillbit Taylor" aren't so much interested in a movie about the tyranny of bullies as they are completely turned on by the violence they inflict. Brill already has a dim pro-wrestling comedy under his belt (2000's "Ready to Rumble") and in "Drillbit" the kicks to crotches and fists to faces look like they really hurt. You could put the movie on a double-bill with Michael Haneke's current home-invasion torture show, "Funny Games," and its finale is identical to the grisly face-off at the end of "Never Back Down," last week's ode to boys aroused by beating the tar out of each other for an enthusiastic audience. What's going on with America's young dudes?
Of course, this is not to say the cruelty in "Drillbit Taylor" lacks ethical value. The sight of poor Dorfman, screeching and begging not to be stuffed into a locker, really brought home why I buy cage-free chickens.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog. 