I was asked not to review this movie until sometime in March, because I saw it at a free preview screening. However, the company that asked this took everyone’s cell phone. Then they wanded us. If you left to get refreshments, they insisted on wanding you again. Same with the bathroom. In spite of all this, a guy with night-vision goggles was prowling the stands throughout the film.

Note to movie PR teams: If you have the ninja goggles guy, you don’t need my phone. You don’t need to wand me, and you don’t need to know what’s in my bag. Ninja-guy is looking for actual pirates, and that’s how you find them. The rest of it is just theater, ruining an evening for a bunch of people who showed up in good faith.

So, due mostly to that second, completely superfluous wanding, here’s my review.

Clever, especially in low doses, cannot do the work of funny.

Clever is easier to produce, of course, and audiences don’t seem to mind the shortchange. That’s why sketch comedy rules the comedy film landscape. Writing funny is hard, but coming up with droll premises and letting UCB kids riff over them is easy. If you shoot enough takes, you can edit together something with an acceptable batting average.

To be genuinely funny, you have to have a real point of view, and you don’t get that from improv exercises.

This movie has almost nothing to do with the show. There are some cops assigned to busting high-school drug rings, but the similarity pretty much ends there. Well, it ends there except for a third act cameo from exactly who you’d expect.

Like all sketch-based comedies, sometimes the bits score. More often they fizzle, chuckles rather than laughs. There’s no real arc, so there’s no real tension. You know how it’s going to turn out in every scene and the surprises are few and far between. There are some funny people doing their best here, and the result wasn’t awful, really. It’s just that you’ll find yourself forgetting this movie while it’s still happening. Watch the trailer and call it good.