By MELINDA ENNIS
For The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The premise is in itself a comedic conundrum: A group of 30-something guys start a fraternity to escape married, middle-class monotony. While gross-out, juvenile humor has its place in a comedy about juveniles, it is pretty pathetic coming out of the mouths of grown-up men trying to act like juveniles.

The story, such as it is, begins when Mitch (Luke Wilson) catches his hot-to-trot, live-in girlfriend, played by the once-hot starlet Juliette Lewis, cheating on him. After their bust-up, Mitch rents a house on the edge of a college campus. His best friends, long-married Beanie (Vince Vaughn) and recently married Frank (Will Ferrell), encourage Mitch to make the house "party central." But when it's rezoned to on-campus status, the friends must devise a way to keep their smarmy playhouse or be booted out.

Their dubious solution is to create a fraternity -- one that accepts all ages and races but has no social or academic responsibility. The motley crew that assembles includes an 89-year-old drunk and a 400-pound student, a combination that inspires every hackneyed, insipid gag you'd expect from this kind of movie. The old man ends up with a coronary when wrestling two nubile co-eds in a vat of K-Y Jelly, and the fat kid frequently falls on his face. That's about as funny as it gets.

Lesson 101 in a film such as this is to create one seemingly sane person who is trying to tone down the foolish behavior surrounding him -- the comic straight man whom the rest of the characters play off of. In "Old School," it is Mitch. But Wilson's performance is as lifeless as the script, and he seems to be pretending he is somewhere else -- perhaps preparing to talk to his agent about why he's in this film.

Then we have "Saturday Night Live's" Ferrell as Frank, straining mightily for laughs -- getting naked, drunk and shot by a tranquilizer gun. His one faintly funny moment is a graveside, off-key rendition of "Dust in the Wind."

As an insensitive slob with a heart of gold, Vaughn seems like an actor priming himself for Tom Arnold parts.

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