Bad education

Reviewed - School for Scoundrels: In 1959 Robert Hamer, the man behind Kind Hearts and Coronets, took Stephen Potter's Lifemanship books - sly, satiric pastiches of early self-help guides - and turned them into a ramshackle, but endlessly charming, film called School for Scoundrels.

Ian Carmichael starred as a terminal loser who, after being humiliated before his girlfriend by arch-cad Terry-Thomas, enlists in a Lifemanship course taught by Alistair Sim.

In this ropey new version from the director of Old School, Jon Heder, the likeable oddball from Napoleon Dynamite, plays a geek ridiculed by aggressive work colleagues and frustrated by his hopeless desire for the pretty girl next door (Jacinda Barrett).

Billy Bob Thornton, here called Dr P, begins by helping build the younger man's confidence, before moving in on the love interest himself. He is thus required to be both Alistair Sim and Terry-Thomas, which is surely asking too much of any man, even one who stayed married to Angelina Jolie for three whole years.

There are funny moments in the new version. Sarah Silverman brings some of the withering wit of her stand-up act to the role of Barrett's roommate, and Heder, though a very modestly talented actor, is always poignantly amusing when being sat upon by bigger, stronger boys. But the longer the film progresses the thinner its premise is stretched. By the final 20 minutes a dreadful sense of panic has set in.

Ben Stiller - disingenuously conspicuous in the film's trailer - is dragged in to do some extremely broad mugging. The rivals whack each other over the head with tennis racquets, before being compelled to take part in that tired staple of the romantic comedy: a race to the airport to avert something or other. It eventually grinds to a halt with an apologetic epilogue apparently composed to make sense of the senselessness before.

It doesn't work. What was it Terry-Thomas said repeatedly in the original film's famous tennis match? "Hard cheese, old boy!"