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THE NEW GUY

Not another teen movie! Please! Dizzy Harrison (DJ Qualls, about 99 pounds of bone and nose) is a geek. He’s tired of being tied up and attired in faux tits, sick of getting his dick snapped into protractor-accurate right angles by elderly librarians. He needs a tough new image, and a brand new school, so he starts loitering at the local penitentiary, enlisting inmate Luther (Eddie Griffin, mugging like the bastard child of Chris Tucker and Dolemite) and some bad cops (shameless fraud Henry Rollins is one of ’em) to show him how it’s done. Dizzy gets expelled, he transfers, he learns an important lesson about being true to himself, and blah blah blah. Does he wind up with the popular girl (Boston’s Eliza Dushku)? Does a principal shit in a stall?

Despite Ed Decter’s manic comic-book direction, this flick plods slower than an eighth-period study hall and has about as many laughs. And though Decter thinks a string of gratuitous cameos (Vanilla Ice, Tommy Lee, Gene Simmons — all of whom must be cash-poor) will enliven this listless crap fest, they do not. He’s even swallowed the comedic truism that dwarves are always good for a chuckle. So when Lyle Lovett, who plays Dizzy’s doofus dad and is about the only decent thing in this whole sorry mess, gets a marshmallow inflammatorily grafted to his eye socket, it’s a tidy metaphor about what happens to good people in bad movies.

BY MIKE MILIARD

Issue Date: May 9 - 16, 2002
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