Director: Rob Cohen
Starring: Joshua Jackson, Paul Walker, Hill Harper, Craig T. Nelson, Christopher Macdonald, Leslie Bibb

What with all the faked suicides, vampires and corrupt basketball teams, Hollywood has never had that friendly a relationship with the esteemed colleges of the Ivy League; one supposes it’s revenge for painful hazing memories on behalf of disturbed studio execs. But incessantly we march back to the campuses movie after movie, apparently not yet fully convinced that, yes, rich kid’s university can be pretty fucked up.

Behind the scenes at Cohen’s Harvard, the show is run by a group of shady secret societies (which should not be confused with fraternities, such as Lambda Lambda Lambda). Our boy Luke (Jackson) has worked himself up off of the tough streets of Cambridge Massachusetts, out of a life of crime and into Harvard Law. However, this is the American education system and he’s flat broke and doesn’t fancy a six figure debt. But wait, what’s this? A shady secret society called The Skulls offering to foot the bill and throw in a fancy new car just for the heck of it? Surely there must be some kind of catch!

Luke’s best mate, inquisitive student journo Will (Harper) thinks so, and is prepared to go to any length to prove it. It would appear that Nelson (television’s ‘Coach’), leader of the organization, is not all that he seems, and internal politics might just lead to bloodshed. But when the shit goes down and Luke wants out, at every turn they are watching, in every corner of society. Except when he’s having sex with the tacked on love interest, of course.

You can peg where this one is going from the moment it starts, but it works its little heart out trying to convince you it’s heading somewhere important. The acting is at the level of a high school play, the script seems as though they made it up as they were going along and it appears to have been shot by a well trained monkey, but for some reason it remains an enjoyable diversion which is in no way objectionable.
From its grandiose prologue, informing us of the tradition of Secret Societies in the American college system, through to its predictable finish, Cohen tries desperately to convince us that this film has an important message, neglecting the fact that you do not generally convey important messages using stars of ‘Dawson’s Creek’, ‘She’s All That’, ‘Happy Gilmore’ and ‘Coach’. Jackson is cast all wrong as the athletic type with permanently worried look — Pacey in rowing lycra is a sight I will not forget in a hurry.

Harvard, or at least Cohen’s rendition of, is enjoyably gothic and gloomy, allowing plenty of opportunity for characters to stand dramatically spotlit in front of profound backdrops while delivering turgid erevelations’ designed to shunt the plot along.
Cohen and screenwriter Pogue aim for a good, dense, Hitchcockian web of intrigue, but end up with little more than a straight line of vague curiosity. A little more talent might have pushed the script somewhere more plausible, but in the end the film sits comfortably in its niche: a good hour and three quarters of enjoyable hokum which means less than it’s meant to but passes the time quickly without insulting your intelligence to any great degree. And who says we have to go to the movies for anything more?