Unlike other films whose thin plots were, almost without a doubt, constructed around a catchy title, Old School is legitimately funny and laced with real intelligence. Director Todd Phillips's efforts to inflate played-out generic scenarios and by-the-book conversations with really bizarre humor rescue what would have been, under a more restrained director's editorial influence, a disastrous and embarrassing exercise. But Phillips (also responsible for the HBO-shelved documentary Frat House, and the Phish movie), whose previous film Road Trip toed a more precarious line between humor and failure, is reckless in his placement of comedy; for a plot as thin as Old School's this recklessness is a gift and a saving grace. Jokes spring up where you would most and least expect them-in a frat house bedroom during a blowout party, or at an octogenarian's funeral. Phillips's secret weapon is SNL-grad Will Ferrell, without whom this ridiculous comic excess would be impossible. Old School lets Ferrell play the character he perfected during his years on late night television: a bullheaded, childish grown man who can't recognize his own shortcomings. He's precisely the tool for a comedic director willing to take risks, and Phillips uses him almost unerringly throughout the film.

The aforementioned thin plot begins with an unfortunate encounter between Mitch (Luke Wilson), and his girlfriend (played with laconic splendor by Juliette Lewis). Mitch comes home early from a business trip to find her hosting an orgy and instead of getting in on the fun, Mitch packs up and moves out. He relocates to a house on the local college campus, a quaint residence that his two married friends Frank (Ferrell) and Beanie (Vince Vaughn) immediately convert into a magical place where they can reenact the debauchery of their youths away from various wives, children, coworkers, and other responsibilities.

The three revelers summon the fury of Harrison University's dean (Jeremy Piven), a stuffy and resentful antagonistic force whom our three heroes apparently used to pick on years before. Though Phillips never makes clear the crux of their historical dispute, it's apparently deep enough to compel the dean to use a loophole in the campus charter (do campuses really have "charters?") to kick Mitch out of his house. The property, the dean asserts, must be used for University-related housing or programs. Somehow, in a turn of events that happens quickly and with little explanation, the triumvirate starts a fraternity, which would allow them to keep the house. They enlist anyone who wants to join their pathetic club-old men, the dangerously obese, dorky outcast college students. How three thirtysomething men with no connection to the college could start a legitimate fraternity is one of the many speed bumps Phillips's plot flies over on its way to another Will Ferrell ass joke.

But damn if that ass joke isn't hilarious, and worth every knit brow or puzzled shrug in the theater. Ferrell (and his ass) brings a barely contained insanity to the film, and the discomfort and pathos created by this bumbling man's continuous self-disintegration is story's center. Old School's protagonist may be Mitch, but its hero is Frank. Mitch has the love interest, the job, the life on the line; Frank has a failing marriage and a penchant for drinking too much. We're drawn to Frank because he's lost. Mitch's life is going to turn out fine at the end of act three, but there's no similar certainty for Frank. Though his tender moments are few and far between (and perhaps especially poignant for their scarcity), Frank is presented as a good, caring person who can't find his way in the world of adulthood. Phillips uses this subtle sense of the pathetic to augment his already funny jokes-when Frank, naked and incoherent, busts up a Snoop Dogg performance and is met with the horrified gazes of hundreds of college kids, the personal embarrassment he doesn't feel is suddenly our burden to deal with. And the only way we can is to laugh, long and hard.

Vaughn plays Beanie with the same smooth sarcasm he employed in Swingers, and without him as a leader of the group, the film wouldn't have anywhere to go. Almost always shown with one of his children and almost always crying out against the tyranny of marriage, Beanie is covertly a happy and willing supporter of monogamy. In one scene, he turns down the advances of an eager coed, but asks for her number, in case his wife were ever to die. This almost-sweet moment seems in opposition to the drunken adolescent re-immersion that Mitch, Frank and Beanie so valiantly try to obtain, but it's that central morality (on the part of all three leads) that keeps Old School from going too far. KY Jelly wrestling matches and sex with high-schoolers sounds risqué on paper, but by the end of the film, their "immorality" seems awfully tame. The three guys use one last chance at childhood to figure out what adulthood can offer them, and though it's quite obvious what they're going to discover, Phillips keeps the journey moving nicely throughout.
-NEAL BLOCK