'Mystery Team': Nerdy teen detectives in over their heads

Having carved out some cyberturf of its own, Derrick Comedy, a young comedy group with dozens of video shorts already on its Web site (www.derrickcomedy.com) and YouTube, is now reaching for the biggest screens.

"Mystery Team," the group's first feature film, asks a question: What are a trio of arrested-development kid detectives supposed to do when they age out of their peer group? Jason (Donald Glover), Duncan (DC Pierson) and Charlie (Dominic Dierkes) are weeks away from high-school graduation, yet they remain dweebs and detested by a town tired of their pursuits of pie vandals and other bad-behaving children. When a little girl asks them to find out who killed her parents, Jason sees it as a chance to redeem and redefine the team. Things quickly get dark and more adult than any of them are ready for, with trips to a strip club and a drug den for starters.

"Mystery Team," directed by Dan Eckman, runs up against the hazard that confronts all sketch comedy: Can an idea that works for 5 minutes be sustained for more than 100?

Not surprisingly, especially for a movie heavy on college humor, the results are hit-and-miss. Some bits fall thuddingly flat, and the characters are rarely more than stick figures.

But the screenplay, also handled by Pierson, Dierkes and Glover, a staff writer for "30 Rock," is at times razor sharp: no sloppy improv here. Some of the film's best lines are throwaways. At an office party Jason crashes, one middle manager wearily tells another who is behaving badly that "sometimes I wish you didn't beat cancer, I really do."