'Take Me Home' as immature as its characters

What a waste.

“Take Me Home Tonight” could have be a crass comedy that still gave strength and reassurance to anxious college graduates spit out into a world where immaturity, fear of the future and incapacitating self-doubts are shown to be temporary, solvable problems.

Instead, “Take Me Home Tonight” uses these graduates as plot fodder in a shameless, frat-boy gross-out comedy that suggests success isn't confronting fear of failure, but fear of rolling down a hill inside a giant metal ball as if the characters are trapped in the latest “Jackass” reality movie.

Topher Grace stars as Matt Franklin, a newly minted MIT graduate with a fuzzy future.

In 1988, he can't find work with the kind of Fortune 500 companies his parents had hoped for. So, he spends his time shuffling VHS video cassettes at the local Suncoast Video store.

He and his twin sister Wendy (Anna Faris) join his best buddy Barry (Dan Fogler) for a zany night out, a night that will take the trio through tests and trials and turn them into wiser, better people.

But they don't become all that much wiser or better, just stupider, and corrupt.

Matt is staging a protest against maturity (a symptom of immaturity?).

Barry, an inept and grating car salesman, wants to get revenge against his employer for firing him.

At the same time, one of Matt's old school adversaries is throwing a party and Matt thinks it would be great to show up in a hot car to impress the girls.

So, he and Barry steal an expensive sports car off the lot and go tearing down the road on their way to mischief and mayhem.

(The local cops apparently aren't all that good at tracking stolen sports cars, but then, Matt's own father, played by Michael Biehn, is a cop.)

Matt gets the opportunity to live out a common fantasy: to be recognized and appreciated by his high school crush, in this case, the fetching Tori Frederking (“I Am Number Four” co-star Teresa Palmer).

As Matt goes through the night working through his maturity issues and old high school wounds, Barry goes crazy with drugs and women.

Reportedly, studio executives held up the release of the movie because of the heavy drug use, now an un-PC, hard-to-market topic, even though the 1980s were notorious for cocaine abuse.

Fogler frequently lapses into extreme John Belushi mode in “Take Me Home,” and his comic overdose of unbridled physicality provides a few laughs, even though there's a nagging seen-it-before feeling to his outrageous explosions.

Granted, “Take Me Home Tonight” isn't supposed to be a brilliant black comedy for a generation of grads, such as “The Graduate.”

“Take Me Home” is content to be a crazy, gross quest for meaning, and it doesn't mind that the ethical issues of grand theft auto and corrupt police dads go unaddressed.

Because it's set in 1988, “Take Me Home” goes to town with period hits with the power to strum the chords of nostalgia for audiences who came of age during that period.

Adam Sandler's “The Wedding Singer” did it better.

Besides, if the No. 1 attraction of a movie is its soundtrack, why not just buy that instead of a ticket?

<b>“Take Me Home Tonight”</b>

1½ stars

<b>Starring:</b> Topher Grace, Anna Faris, Dan Fogler, Teresa Palmer, Michael Biehn

<b>Directed by:</b> Michael Dowse

<b>Other:</b> A Relativity Films release. Rated R for drug use, language, sexual situations. 98 minutes