The Cinema of the Four

Drillbit Taylor

While a loyal friend and a stalwart fellow as an adult, the good Dr. Watson IV cannot be said to have always been so noble. As with all the Watson men, there is a certain family tradition about “chevying the nobs about the schoolyard and hitting them on the shins with a wicket” seems to be requisite for getting all their evil worked out at a young age. We Holmeses, on the other hand, have always been on the other side of schoolyard bullying, as we tend to be equally divided between Mycroftian fat and Sherlockian skinny – neither doing us much good among the young. Eventually we take up boxing and fencing and work matters out, but there are always those early, unprepared encounters with the more brutish among humanity that come as a shock to our ever-so civilized minds.

So it was that I found myself in almost frightening sympathy with the protagonists of the movie “Drillbit Taylor,” a coming-of-age tale about three hapless schoolyard victims who unwittingly hire a homeless man as their bodyguard. The story works its plot from two different angles: that of the kids versus their archnemesis and that of the homeless man whose double-chicanery in pretending to be a bodyguard posing as a substitute teacher will eventually be found out.

“Drillbit Taylor” is one of those whimsical tales in which things happen only as they do in movie-land, where an ex-husband can pose as an English nanny or a cop can pose as an obese grandmother, so a homeless man posing as an ex-military bodyguard who infiltrates a school is not so big a stretch of the imagination. Owen Wilson, as the title character, is the same lovable rogue he’s cast in so often, but the kids (Nate Hartley and Troy Gentile) give the movie substance as the terrorized freshman just trying to fit in.

In a way, the movie comes off as a strange “Karate Kid” film, not a flat-out comedy, as the filmmakers efforts to build the perfect bully gets the viewer actually frightened for the kids, with the looming threat of a near-death beating ever present. Their bully, played by Alex Frost, has the sort of lean muscles that one usually associates convicts and military men, but Frost’s slightly psychotic look definitely makes him definitely resemble the former.

The movie seems a bit long at almost two hours, but the big summer movie previews that line up before any movie at this time of year could be adding to that fact. With lean pickings at the theater of late, though, “Drillbit Taylor” is a fair way to pass the time, if only for a movie buff’s perfect sort of cameo by Adam Baldwin.

What great-grandfather Sherlock might have said:
“Let me get to the points in my own humdrum fashion. I have all this against you; but, above all, I have a clear case against both you and your fighting bully.”