Accepted (12A)

Justin Long is one of the most amiable supporting characters in Hollywood.

Whether he's saving the day in Galaxy Quest, being lovelorn in Herbie: Fully Loaded, or picked on in Dodgeball, you cannot help but like him. Much of Accepted's surprising charm has to do with Long's likeability. As teen comedies go this is one of the better ones.

Long is nicely convincing as a young man who has been rejected from every college he applies to. In desperation he invents a school to which he has been accepted to fool his parents.

He is now a proud student of South Harmon Institute of Technology - and those initials provide some decent jokes - and can hold his head up high.

The key to his deception is a web page designed by a friend. The problem is the web page is designed so well that he starts to get real applicants and finds himself running a real college.

Although it tries to evoke the anarchy of Old School, Accepted doesn't quite get there and tails off in the final third.

Old School of course had Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn, Accepted has Justin Long and Jonah Hill. They're okay but they've got some distance to go before they graduate as fully-fledged comedy stars.

Justin Long stars as Bartleby Gaines, a high-school failure who decides to start his own college in this, the first shot at directing for Pink, one of the writers on Grosse Pointe Blank.

To be fair, the script is marginally above average for a college caper. There are no big laughs, but it does raise a couple of smiles, largely due to the presence of Jonah Hill as the fat, sarcastic friend who just wants to fit in at the real college up the hill.

That said, Accepted's attempts to say something cutting about education as a service industry eventually descend into hippie mush about the importance of unleashing the creativity within us all.