A young veteran down on his luck, “Drillbit Taylor,” played by Owen Wilson, signs up to be the bodyguard of three nerdy freshmen. I expected so much more than “and wackiness ensues.” When he’s writing for himself (his phony Western novelist Eli Cash in “The Royal Tenenbaums”) he’s as subversive and mind-blowing as Alanis Morissette covering Fergie. But with someone else’s words guiding him, as in “Drillbit,” the result is as dumb and dismal as SmashMouth covering The Monkees.

Sorry, Seth Rogen. Next time, bring the bong into the test screening — and dump it soundly on anyone who tells you to tone down the cigarettes, “Blade Runner” references, naughty words and the war. Oh yeah, the war!

“Drillbit Taylor” had an easy crack at being a good movie about a street-wise outsider helping pampered kids overcoming a momentary scuffle — and teaching them a little something about how petty those concerns are, like “With Honors” did with Harvard kids and homelessness. Instead, it’s a bad time capsule from the 90s, a glimpse into a world where an Army jacket is just another ironic thrift-store accessory, like a battered straw hat and a distressed screen-printed shirt. It’s as creatively shallow as the episode of “Saved By the Bell” where the principal’s groovy brother gets a job as a substitute.

And it’s frankly embarrassing that it can enjoy success seven years into military operations in Afghanistan.

I didn’t expect I’d find any comparison between “Drillbit Taylor” and “Day Zero,” but that’s because I figured “Drillbit” would say something, anything, more current about what happens when privileged kids are confronted with their own shallowness. Instead, we’re left with the sense that a swath of shiny, happy people still equate “veteran” with shiftless, crazy, suspicious losers whose wires got crossed doing something despicable in a hard-to-find country with a funny name. The kinds of bums who weren’t smart enough to stay out of harm’s way. The movie ends with a deus ex machina warning against underage drinking more hastily tacked on than a student union kiosk.