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Verdict: Rube Biggs meets and falls for streetwise romantic Suvari in a recycled plot from the Billy Wilder library.

Details: Rated PG-13 for drugs and alcohol, mild sexual situations, and language. 1 hour, 38 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Either Billy Wilder is going to be very flattered by the new teen romantic comedy Loser or he is going to have great grounds for a plagiarism suit.

Writer-director Amy Heckerling has brought fresh qualities to teen films from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Clueless, but you would never confuse her for darkly cynical satirist Wilder. Still, it dawns on us slowly that there is something awfully familiar about her latest effort, the tale of a sweetly naive Midwesterner named Paul (Jason Biggs, who romanced that pastry in American Pie) who comes to New York for college and falls for cash-strapped coed Dora (Mena Suvari, the sexual tease of American Beauty), who is having an affair with their European Lit professor.

When Paul gets up the nerve to ask Dora to a concert, she accepts, then stands him up, getting drunk and drugged at a party held, unbeknownst to her, at Paul's place. He returns home, finds her passed out, nurses her back to health, and they grow closer. Gradually, she realizes what an unfeeling louse the professor is and leaves him for Paul, who she sees is anything but a loser.

Without crediting it, Heckerling has duplicated the plot of the 1960 Oscar winner The Apartment, substituting a contemporary college milieu for the corporate world. Chances are most of the movie's target teen audience will not know the original source or care, but the alterations have been made quite cleverly. If Heckerling is going to borrow from another movie, at least you have to admire her taste in what she chooses to plunder. And it does give adults something to focus on and retain their interest throughout.

As he heads off to the Big City, Paul gets fatherly advice from Dan Ackroyd about being nice to everyone and looking them in the eye. Wrong. He is taken advantage of from his first moments in New York, as his three rotten roommates gang up on him instantly. Of course, it doesn't help that he wears an "Abuse-me-I-am-a-geek" winter hat with ear flaps, as if he were a fugitive from the movie Fargo. Heckerling does tap into our college memories, when so many of us felt like outcasts and losers. In the movies, however, losers get to end up with the likes of Suvari.

Dora is given quirks like subsisting on free packets of honey and chugging thimbles of coffee whitener. She is a hopeless romantic, blind enough not to see how she is being used by the condescending prof (Greg Kinnear). Suvari is an endearing waif who can hold onto our sympathies even after she loses honesty points by demonstrating to Paul how to steal bread and sneak into Broadway shows.

Part of their bonding process involves farm boy Paul showing Dora how to cut a newborn kitten out of its placenta. Those with queasy stomachs might want to stroll to the lobby at this point. As romantic stars, Suvari and Biggs will never be confused for, say, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, but they generate sufficient chemistry to fuel a vehicle like Loser.

True, interest does spike more whenever Heckerling brings in one of her several cameo players. Don't blink or you might miss Andy Dick as a prune-sucking bureaucrat, David Spade as a vindictive video store clerk and Andrea Martin as a sour teacher. There is probably a better movie to be made about the three of them.

It takes a certain confidence to name your movie Loser, giving reviewers and headline writers such easy ammunition. Heckerling has not made an unqualified winner, but she has crafted a better-than-average summer night's entertainment. Of course, she started with great material.

— Hap Erstein, Cox News Service

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