The titles, characters, and places of learning are different, but for all intents and purposes, Stealing Harvard is the same film as this year's Orange County. Each features a blandly affable lead and a comic ringer ricocheting from one repulsive character and grating comic setup to another, ostensibly in the name of higher education. True, Orange County didn't feature Tom Green getting raped by a dog, or a running gag involving a pathetic widower forcing intruders to dress up like his dead wife, but it wasn't above such bits. Proving once again that the intelligence of comedies about elite colleges is often inversely proportional to the intellectual level of the college in question, Harvard stars Jason Lee as a put-upon working stiff who has finally saved up enough money to buy a house and marry his sweetheart. Lee's key to the American dream turns into a noose, however, after his trailer-park-dwelling niece is accepted to Harvard, and her mother (Megan Mullally) reminds Lee that he promised to finance her college education. Of course, in real life, a scholastically adept trailer-park denizen would probably be able to attain financial aid without much difficulty, but Harvard bulldozes over such considerations in pursuit of cheap laughs that never arrive. Desperate to raise the necessary money, Lee teams up with zany chum Tom Green, who ropes him into a series of schemes involving such disreputable characters as an obnoxious pornographer (Seymour Cassel), a thuggish high-school acquaintance (Chris Penn), and the aforementioned widower (Richard Jenkins). Lee's affable niece clocks far less screen time than the frisky, Green-attracted canine, in large part because the filmmakers don't seem to have any use for characters who do anything other than hurl puerile insults. An uncomfortable-looking Lee soldiers doggedly through a thankless role, while Green, though never particularly funny, at least brings off-kilter energy to a role that provides Stealing Harvard's only spark of spontaneity.