Bullies Bothering You? Hire An Ex-Ranger!
Troy Gentile and Nate Hartley are best friends that are beginning their high school careers with high hopes and an understandable since of anxiety. Both are concerned about popularity and being picked on, but each tries to maintain a positive attitude going in. Alex Frost’s character, a punk eighteen year old at the school makes it a point to bully these two and their new friend played by David Dorfman from day one. With the help of his friend, Frost’s character makes life very hard for these young freshmen in humorous, but mischievous terrible ways. After only about a week of tyranny, with no end in sight, the boys plan to hire a bodyguard to help them out.
Enter Drillbit Taylor, played by Owen Wilson. A retired ex-US Army Ranger, or so we think, who finds himself broke and homeless on the streets of Santa Monica. He’s admittedly lazy, and likes to drink, smoke, and play the lottery, but his most recent epiphany is traveling to Canada to get away from it all and start anew. To do that, he needs money, and so he cons the boys by taking the job. Initially Drillbit has no interest in helping the boys, but instead tries to steal and sell items from their houses to get his plane ticket. However, several experiences change his view, and his life in very profound ways, and well, as you can predict pretty clearly in the film, he does end up helping his employers out.
In sum, I thought Drillbit Taylor was a very enjoyable film; it was better than I expected, let me say that, too. There’s plenty of well written comedy throughout, and each star does a very good job in presenting their characters, which are diverse enough that they are interesting and meaningful. Drillbit Taylor does a great job of making a good and accessible family film, however PG-13 mind you, while still being entertaining for everyone.
I Got the Blus; But That’s Not Always A Bad Thing
I thought the video quality of Drillbit Taylor on Blu-ray was great. It’s a very realistic movie, no CGI or animations or extraordinary effects, so while it won’t blow you away, I think you will be impressed with the quality of everything from the skin textures to the vegetation (there are quite a few outdoor scenes) to the colors of clothing that all of the students wear. It was a very clean and crisp presentation on Blu-ray, and that’s not too surprising given that it’s a new film.
As far as the audio presentation, well, again don’t expect anything phenomenal, this is a down to earth film and therefore it’s primarily dialogue driven. On that note, the Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track delivers impressively, lending to very understandably dialogue which comes from a variety of ages and voice types in the film.
Sure Looks Like A Lot of Extras
From the menu, you’d think Drillbit Taylor has a ridiculous amount of extras, but you wouldn’t be quite right. There is an audio commentary track featuring five members of the cast and crew: the three young actors, the director Steven Brill, and a co-producer, Kristofor Brown. Kristofor is exactly one half of the next feature, a fourteen minute audio (with a slideshow of movie stills playing) track whereby Kristofor calls Seth Regan who is on set at another film. Seth and Kristofor wrote the film and they spend the better part of fifteen minutes reminiscing and talking about several different aspects of the movie and what they would have like to have included or how they come upon an idea (like the name Drillbit, for example); I thought this was a nice feature, it was interesting.
Next up are about a dozen mini-features. These add up to around forty minutes of very brief making-of features of various scenes in the film. There is a feature on the rap sequence for example, where Troy gets coached in his rapping abilities. Another feature focuses on the two bullies, another on the Bodyguard Interview scene. In addition to this, there are three more three to four minute extras including “Line-O-Rama” which is basically just quick clips of various parts of the film and parts not in the film, with the cast acting; kind of like a mix between bloopers and deleted scenes you might say. Speaking of which there is a four minute gag reel that got a few laughs from me, as well as nineteen deleted scenes that are fairly entertaining.