Fresh from the two big 'American'  hits (Pie and Beauty, respectively) Biggs and Suvari are surely a winning combination and director Amy Heckerling (of Clueless and Fast Times at Ridgemont High fame) has shown she has a talent for good teen flicks, however this film simply doesn’t click. A movie based on the teen/college years needs an extra edge in this current climate, inundated with this genre, and Loser just simply hasn’t got it.

Loser is centred on good-natured country boy Paul’s (Biggs) move to the ‘Big Apple’ (New York) to start University and the struggles he has to endure as a college student. Once there Paul has hellish hall mates, who constantly bully, tease and ridicule him through a series of supposed comedy moments, which are unfunny, cruel and made me squirm. Having been set up by his oh-so ‘perfect’ mates Paul finds himself living alone in a veterinary surgery and contemplates quitting college. This is until he meets fellow struggling student Dora (Survari, lovely as always) who he instantly falls for, but unfortunately the small matter of her boyfriend being a college professor (Kinnear) causes the majority of the ups and downs for the rest of the film.

Though I am a complete sucker for this type of movie and did quite enjoy Loser, in reality it provided few laughs and was utterly predictable. This is a great shame, as the talented lead actors deserved more than this. The true problem lay with a film that really had no new ideas to offer and it’s immensely dislikeable characters, particularly Paul’s room-mates, who were beyond obnoxious.

Unfortunately the teen movie became drastically tiring over a year ago and now any film on these lines is just plain dull. If there is a way forward it will surely be through acerbic satires, such as Election and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or alternatively gross-out humour of films like American Pie and the recent Road Trip (which I did give the thumbs up to). For the time being though films like Loser are making the cinema rather devoid of choice on a Saturday night.