Jason Segel: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

4. Sam Schecter - Slackers (2002)

Having seen Freaks & Geeks unfairly pulled out from under him, it was a little while before Segel really broke back and until How I Met Your Mother came along he bounced from under-whelming role to under-whelming role in barely seen movies. Those who did see his early millennial movies though would not have been impressed by his turn as student grifter Sam in this paint by numbers cocky teen comedy. It's a very consciously post-Mallrats, post-Clerks revenge comedy that feels like it's been cobbled together from superior films without learning anything from its magpie-ing. And unfortunately for Segel, there's absolutely nobody to root for. Everyone is a cliche, and a grotesque one at that, and it's difficult to shake the feeling that it thinks it's really very smart with it. Frankly, it's not, and it was almost an unfortunate false-start for Segel's movie career.