Road  Trip

According to Hollywood, a roadtrip is always an eventful thing. You have fun, you learn things about yourself, perhaps even find love, then again you could just as easily encounter a serial killer and wind up fleeing for your life. In the movies, nothing can be as simple as getting from point A to point B, there is always a great in-between. These movies, be they thrillers or comedies are all about events, no deep, meaningful plot is necessary, just so long as the script holds the attention and the characters your empathy. For the most part, Todd Phillips' big screen debut fails to do either. From the get-go, Roadtrip finds itself lacking in originality, stealing its central conceit from the 1997 Paul Rudd, Reese Witherspoon vehicle (pun fully intended) Overnight Delivery. In both movies a seemingly spurned boyfriend sends his girlfriend (however inadvertently in Roadtrip's case) a less-than-pleasant "gift", learns that he isn't so spurned after all and goes on the road in an effort to retrieve the package before his beloved opens it. Both are college set and both deal in wacky, less-than-PC antics. Unlike Overnight Delivery, Roadtrip is very much a boy's own type adventure with the quartet of suitably mix-and-matched students determined to have a sex-fuelled, drug-induced, fun-filled time on the road. They are the typical teenage stereotypes; the straight, sensible one, Josh, the loud, wacky-as-all-hell dude E.L., the nerd, Kyle and Mr dopehead, Rubin. Meanwhile, back on-campus, their friend, college veteran Barry narrates the whole tale to a tour group, taking great pride in recanting his own rodent-tinged adventures. The press - big surprise - are taking the easy way out, describing Roadtrip as a college-based American Pie and while I can understand this comparison, it really does a great disservice to the Weitz brothers' hugely enjoyable teen comedy. The main reason Pie works considerably better than its collegiate cousin is due to the fact that everything from the humour to the characters develop naturally. Roadtrip is too much like a sitcom, with the set-up and a punch-line seen coming a mile away. Most of the humour seems forced and elaborate, while whole scenes fall flat, completely devoid of laughs i.e. the entire episode set in the black fraternity, stopping the movie dead in its tracks. Thankfully, there are a few set-pieces that work remarkably well, such as the old man and his dog scenes among others. The whole gross-out theme has very much ran its course. I, for one have become anaesthetised to gags involving bodily fluids and screwed-up animals. The cast work fairly well despite the mostly-lazy material with Sean W. Scott pretty much playing American Pie's Stifler sans jerk attitude and bringing some much needed energy to the whole production. Breckin Meyer, always a watchable support-player takes the nominal "lead" and plays it well but he still lacks the charisma of his contemporaries. Newcomer, D.J. Qualls has one of those faces and physiques that has you wondering how he will ever get out of the geek-typecast, which of course is perfect for Kyle. The weakest link in the central group is Paulo Costanzo's Rubin, a character who barely registers, a non-entity who lingers in the background for the most part until given his key scene in which a dog upstages him. MTV crazyman, Tom Green is very much the star here, bringing his own brand of mania effortlessly to the big-screen. Although his snake-feeding efforts are among the funniest parts of the movie, an out-take of these scenes shown in the trailer just tops them all. At the end of the day, I still can't believe how stagnant most of Roadtrip is. Rather than growing a heart, no matter how small, it seemed content, wallowing in a pit of juvenilia aimed solely at undemanding thirteen-year-olds. Maybe it's just me, ol Mr Maturity but a scrawny guy having sex with an over-weight chubby girl is just NOT funny. I can see this movie as the next "hip" thing for school-age kids to see, thus guaranteeing it a reasonably healthy box office, but anyone with a remotely capable sense-of-humour should steer well clear.