5/10

Friends, enemies, and high school memories are at the helm of a twenty year class reunion in Directors Jarred Paul and Andrew Mogul’s ‘The D Train’. High school outcast, Dan (Jack Black), has always been on the outside looking in, but he has an idea to change it all. If he can convince Oliver Lawless (James Marsden), the most popular guy from his high school who’s now the face of a national Banana Boat ad campaign, to show up with him to their class reunion, he will be the star of the night. With the mission in mind, Dan travels from Pittsburgh to LA and spins a web of lies to recruit Lawless. But he gets more than he bargains for as the unpredictable Lawless proceeds to take over his home, career, and entire  life. While ‘The D Train’ has problems in it’s script that mostly derive from a lack of clarity and reaction from it’s characters, the film should be commended for it’s gutsy ability to take risks that are very few seen in a comedy genre. The movie hits us with a big twist midway through the film, and it’s one that i did see coming. What i didn’t see coming however, was just how far the two writers/directors decided to take the result of such a twist at the risk of possibly alienating their own audience. Everything worked for me until i realized that this film and the events that follow post-turn would be better suited for a drama piece to accompany the past demons of a main character that we get a glance with, but never enough of a look in to understand why he feels abandoned from his other classmates. Black gives a performance far from anything we know him as when he became such an A-lister in early 21st century comedies. I do feel like Black was miscast in the film, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t give us something to appreciate while trying to push so much more out of this film. The comparisons between his character and Marsden’s are pretty eye-opening, despite the two of them not even realizing it. With each lie, they both become deeper and deeper buried beneath the poison they have spewed, and as a result they take a lot more people down with them. The characters were written very wonderfully human, but that doesn’t mean that i would ever want to spend 93 minutes with people who make a lie seem so easy. The movie had enough going for it until the final ten minutes when no real consequences seem to have ever came, despite a rocky reunion that was far from anything Dan or Oliver ever wanted. I’ve always been a fan of Marsden, and i think he always plays the conceited type very well in films. He’s not hateable, but we have all met the type of person who peaked in high school and doesn’t mind reminding us constantly. The soundtrack was very appropriate for a film whose characters graduated in 1994. From the end of the hair metal era with bands like INXS and Foreigner, to the big boom in Seattle grunge with bands like Candlebox and The Vapors well represented, this soundtrack is a nice audio scrapbook to anyone well versed in this musical timeframe. Overall, i think the movie warrants enough to check it out when it hits DVD shelves. It’s currently riding a small run in limited theaters, but it’s time feels short as it only opened at #11 banking only $456,000 in it’s opening weekend. ‘The D Train’ runs out of steam during a third act that drops the ball on the suspense it has built up to this point. But the honest look in high school stereotypes combined with character humiliation is enough for me to recommend if you are a fan of either of the two protagonists.