ADMISSION (2013) *** Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Lily Tomlin, Gloria Reubens, Wallace Shawn, Michael Sheen, Nat Wolf, Travaris Spears, Sonya Walger, Olek Krupa. Funny and warm-hearted comedy of errors with Fey on top of her game as a Princeton admissions officer who finds herself in a moral quandary: a possible candidate for the esteemed university may be her long-lost son. Rudd is amiable and low-key fun as the director of a special school of higher education including the lad in question and has great chemistry with Fey too boot. Tomlin is a stitch as her crunchy granola feminist mom who steals the film. While director Paul Weitz mixes the screwball with the sentimental in fine spurts the screenplay by Karen Croner, based on Jean Hanff Korelitz' novel, cuts the corners a bit in the satire-rich atmosphere.

Straight-laced Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan (Tina Fey) is caught off-guard when a school administrator of an alternative school (Paul Rudd) pester her for a visit. Then he drops a bomb shell on her. He knew her in their college days and have figured out that one of his student was her son long given up for adoption.

Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) is the gifted but unconventional student who may be her son. He is a very stiff actor. The character he plays is completely wooden. Tina Fey is sad and not the funny kind. In fact, neither Paul Rudd or the film is actually funny.

The only saving grace is that it had likable actors. They try to make this a heart warming story, but with not much success.

My wife and I have decided to watch some rom-coms together in the run up to Valentines day. She likes rom-coms and I do not. So at the moment there are a lot of Matthew Mcconaughey movies to get through!

However the danger signs were there when our daughter who had previously seen this film on a plane walked up and left the room muttering that the film was not very good.

The film starts off well enough although we get the plot explained to us very much in the first few minutes. Tina Fey is an admissions officer at the prestigious Princeton College who has to whittle down thousands of applicants each year for the relatively few places available.

She meets an ex student from her past, Paul Rudd who has started a radical new college which contains a promising but troubled student who might be her son who she gave up for adoption.

The trouble with the movie is that it's neither romantic nor a comedy. I understand the problems of an Ivy League university being oversubscribed and they simply must choose people who will be good students and mix with collegiate life at the campus and reject a lot of others. Although Rudd's students do make a point that admissions officers to these type of places tend not to favour people from poor, working class and ethnic minority backgrounds.

The biggest problem I had was that this rather dull, middling film just took a dive by the end. It could not for example tell the difference that 1:00 am, two hours after 11:00 pm cannot be 1:00 pm and seems not to be too clued up about birth certificates.

I realised when the end credits came on that I was actually thinking about suicide during the final part of the movie. This is a deserved bomb.