Comes down, no doubt

‘What Goes Up’
Director: Jonathan Glatzer
Cast: Steve Coogan, Hilary Duff, Olivia Thirlby
Rating: R

 

Coogan in “What Goes Up”  Photo: 3 KINGS PRODUCTIONS

 

OPENS FRIDAY

 

Sometimes good actors make bad movies. Steve Coogan is a good actor. Molly Shannon is a good actor. Olivia Thirlby and Josh Peck are good actors. Hilary Duff is … well, whatever.

It’s hard to figure out how so many decent entertainers got suckered into rookie director Jonathan Glatzer’s hot mess of a movie. But its terribleness is no less for their presence. Coogan plays a reporter who somehow gets wound up in the lives of a bunch of high school students in pseudo-comic “Dangerous Minds” sort of way. For some reason, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle plays prominently in the background.

There are too many logical missteps in “What Goes Up” to get into here. To catalogue them here would require pages of increasingly scarce newsprint. Suffice it to say that each one would be more than it deserves — and that very actor involved, even Hilary Duff, deserved better than the bruises that this movie will leave on their careers.