ROAD TRIP (2000)
Grade: C
Director: Todd Phillips
Screenplay: Todd Phillips, Scot Armstrong
Starring: Breckin Meyer, Amy Smart, Sean William Scott, DJ Qualls, Tom Green, Paulo Costanzo, Anthony Rapp, Rachael Blanchard, Fred Ward, Andy Dick
Last summer AMERICAN PIE paid homage to raucous T & A comedies like PORKY'S, LOSIN' IT, FRATERNITY VACATION… you know the kind: bunch of horny guys lookin' to get laid with primary focus on the affable, less rowdy of the bunch, the every man if we must give him (and it's always a him) a label. That every man finds himself chasing after "bad" girls alongside his buddies (the buddies customarily consisting of the jocular party animal, the intellectual, the geek--these are sometimes the same person--, and the ladies man), until he eventually realizes (very late in the picture) that what he really desires is the good girl who he's been friends with all along and she just happens to be really hot only he's never noticed until he sees her in make-up usually in slow motion so everyone really gets the idea.
These movies always seemed to be written around the puerile hi-jinks much in the way action films tend to be written around the action set pieces. In LOSIN' IT a great amount of screen time is given to a character's (the jocular party animal if I recall correctly) quest for that elusive Spanish Fly. In PORKY's the story line mostly revolved around the characters' insane commitment to enter a white trash strip joint designated as Porky's (which may be the most unappealing name of a strip club ever), and I can't even remember what the hell happened in FRATERNITY VACATION though I'm sure it wasn't a whole lot different from the previous examples. Problem with many of these "wild comedies", as the geniuses at BLOCKBUSTER video label them, is that for all their exaggerated bawdiness they usually weren't very funny. Yet they still packed in crowds possibly because they took their humor down roads most other comedies refused to travel.
AMERICAN PIE, for all its faults (and there were plenty), was funny. Like SCREAM, it managed to surpass the flicks it appeared to be paying homage to. Chris Weitz, the director, even cut together some cleverly timed comic set pieces (the best being an attempted video taped seduction that turned into something like PENTHOUSE FORUM as envisioned by Mel Brooks when he used to be really good), deliberately amping up the laughs like a crescendo. It's too bad the characters were so bland (all equipped with their single defining trait: the jock, the nerd, ad some nauseum). And it's really too bad Weitz felt the need to inject every other scene with second rate DAWSON'S CREEK angst filled chitchat (first rate DAWSON'S CREEK is pretty bad in itself). It was as if the film wasn't given permission to be what it really wanted to be; an unapologetic, completely profane comedy. Instead it turned flaccid to appease everyone.
ROAD TRIP tosses the syrupy sweetness that infiltrated much of AMERICAN PIE, leaves the bland teens (even casting one of them from AMERICAN PIE), and increases the number of "wacky" antics (which actually has a detrimental effect, but stay tuned, I'll get into that later). The picture is less of an actual film than a series of penis jokes strung together by a thin plot that steals quite liberally from the direct to video clunker OVERNIGHT DELIVERY (it's an improvement over that piece of celluloid detritus, but really anything would be). ROAD TRIP is a groan-athon or a laugh riot depending on your perspective.
The plot centers around the affable hero, Josh (Breckin Meyer), a college student attending the nicely titled Ithaca University, who films himself cheating on his long distance girlfriend (an attendee of the just okay-titled Austin University) with Beth (Amy Smart, who bares her attributes and does little after that), a stunning coed who instigates the encounter. In something of a modern day THREE'S COMPANY twist, one of Josh's buddies inadvertently mails the tape to Josh's girlfriend giving our hero three days to intercept the amateur porn before it finds its way into the mailbox at AU. This contrivance gets Josh and a couple of his generic pals out on the open road, which naturally leads to all the anticipated calamities.
Of course all the x-chomosom-ers are relegated to minor roles, as is de rigeur for a film such as this. Still, to ROAD TRIP's credit (or to the credit of studio execs vying for a more PC sophomoric comedy), they aren't treated as misogynistically as they have been in past male-oriented sex comedies. Though Beth takes the initiative to sleep with Josh, she's never portrayed as a dopey slut (as she would have been had this been made in the early 80's), but as a rather intelligent chick who goes for what she wants. Ditto for the overweight coed who de-flowers one of the boys-- and remember how PORKY's treated its overweight females?
The cast playing the boys are likeable if not especially memorable: Meyer never comes close to registering (but the leads of such films rarely register for all they are really called upon to do is mope and look bewildered until they finally figure out what they really want, all the while the audience could care less), the geek, Kyle (DJ Qualls) who is the butt of much of the film's cruelest humor, Rubin (Paulo Costanzo) the intellectual who needs pot to loosen up, and EL (Sean William Scott, Stiffler in AMERICAN PIE, here essentially playing the same character) is the jocular party animal who sort of resembles a frat boy Brad Pitt, though acts more like Jim Carrey.
MTV comic Tom Green (who may be the next Jim Carrey judging from the audiences' enthusiastic response to his every appearance) has a brief role as Barry, the slacker buddy who stays behind and narrates the film. Though Green isn't really given anything very funny to say, he still manages to get giggles from his googly-eyed stare and dead pan delivery of the sort of zany dialogue that's rarely delivered in a dead pan.
Meanwhile, the main cast must endure various misadventures that are all at least tangentially related to bodily fluids. A couple of isolated bits are amusing, but when we must take in innumerable variations on familiar gross outs (one after the other as is the case here), the whole thing becomes more wearing and tiresome than hysterical, especially when the film has little else besides those gross-outs to recommend it. (In order to get maximum comic effect from ROAD TRIP, I suggest waiting for video, then watching it in fifteen-minute increments…or better yet skip it and re-rent THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY). This is the kind of movie where the director tosses in glimpses of two dogs humping away or a shot of an erect penis silhouetted in underwear for comic effect.
Many of the gags feel like they could have been effective had they been taken to the next level. Phillips seems to think it's funny just to show an erect penis…but not do anything with it. A stiffy in itself isn't terribly side splitting but it can be if used properly (there must be a pun in there some where… not that I consciously intended it). In THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY the Farrelly Brothers presented us with a gob of semen, then actually went so far as to do something very amusing with it. The comedy rose, here it stays at the ground level of a dirty comic afraid to go all the way out of fear of really offending his audience. In one scene wherein the boys stay at Barry's grandparents' house, they're introduced to the grand daddy who convenes in front of the tube engrossed in a very jiggly dance show… then he rises to reveal a very prominent erection. His wife pooh-poohs him, "Oh Barry, put that away" or something to that effect, to which he replies "What am I supposed to do, cut it off?" or something like that, then moves about inadvertently knocking over a vase with the little guy. These are the beginnings of a riotous scene that never develops. It would have been much funnier had the rigid wrotwurst never been mentioned at all leaving the guys to ignore the thing while the old man unknowingly bumps it into various objects. That scene is one of the basic problems that keeps ROAD TRIP from being even as good as AMERICAN PIE (just compare the grandfather bit to the video tapped sex session that goes in that very unexpected direction). Phillips doesn't seem to see any promise: he's simply taking moments inspired by other films, but doing nothing with them.
If anything sinks the film, it's the director's stubborn insistence on non-stop scatology, much it not funny enough to warrant its constant use. As outlandish behavior becomes more common in our mainstream comedies, exactly what taboos will be left to break? If ROAD TRIP didn't have all those erection sight gags what would there be to laugh at? THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARRY and AMERICAN PIE succeeded to a degree because we couldn't believe how far they were willing to go for laughs, but now in a culture where Austin Powers unknowingly munches on excrement and Ben Stiller's jism caked ear is prominently pictured on the cover of mainstream magazines is anyone shocked when a nurse holds up a cup of semen directly into the camera, or a foot fetishist laps on a sleeping woman's toes. I wasn't, and I wasn't laughing much either. Sure, toilet bowl humor can be funny when done correctly (as the Farelly's and sometimes Kevin Smith have shown us), but ROAD TRIP doesn't do anything more then present us with the penises and humping dogs as if the very sight of such things would send us all into uncontrollable fits of laughter. For me, it takes a bit more than that. And I'm guessing, very soon, the same will be said for general audiences.