There’s nothing like a socially conscious version of a five-male-friends-make-a-pact-to-get-laid teen comedy to get the brain humming about today’s important issues. That’s essentially what writer-director Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City) delivers in this story of a high-school student (Mandela Van Peebles) and his four horndog buddies engaging in the usual hormonal mating rituals. Yet the movie spends almost as much time allowing the filmmaker, playing a progressive-minded teacher, to push his students to be better citizens by interviewing homeless people on skid row (!) as it does watching the younger generation trying to get some. It’s an uneasy mixture of crude yukking and mixed-message uplift that satisfies on neither level.
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