What do you do if you don't get the grades to grab that cherished place at university?

Do you reluctantly repeat the slog of revision so you can have another try when the resits come round?

Or do you tart up a disused mental asylum as a go-ahead college and convince your parents you've landed a coveted place.

For Bartleby Gains (Long) this is the obvious solution...because it means he and his slacker chums can pursue a "design your own destiny" curriculum. Which basically means they can do what they want.

Soon the South Harmon Institute of Technology (geddit?) is taking all-comers with the promise of courses offering everything from skateboarding to walking and thinking.

Students include a former stripper, a couple of extreme sports nuts as well as Bartleby's buddies, the hippy-drippy Maria Thayer and wannabe sculptor Columbus Short.

However, things gets tricky when the bona fide Harmon College with its poncey ways and conventional education tries to get Bartleby's phoney alma mater closed down.

This gets A for effort from debut director (and Grosse Point Blank writer) Steve Pink but it's a bit of an under-achiever when it comes to getting the most out of a decent idea.

Long, after winning appearances in the likes of Dodgeball, is a likeable lead and there is plenty of spikey dialogue as well as some attractively out-there characters.

However, it appears a Hollywood studio committee has insisted on an unoriginality clause being inserted when odious frat boys from central casting and a vacuous bimbo girlfriend are shoehorned into the proceedings.

Things would have been fine without them. But their arrival turns what could have been a class act into something that needs extra homework.

Tim Evans