ROAD TRIP (DreamWorks) Starring: Breckin Meyer, Seann William Scott, Amy Smart, Paulo Costanzo, DJ Qualls, Tom Green. Screenplay: Todd Phillips and Scot Armstrong. Producers: Daniel Goldberg and Joe Medjuck. Director: Todd Phillips. MPAA Rating: R (nudity, sexual situations, adult humor, profanity) Running Time: 92 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Having passed the year for which the designation "sophomoric" is named in the mid-1980s, my perspective on a film like ROAD TRIP is bound to be skewed. It is part of a grand tradition of leering, sniggering comedies in which the anti-social behavior and hormone-fueled idiocy of 18-year-olds (portrayed by 25-year-olds) are celebrated for the entertainment of 15-year-olds. But I remember a time when such tales were sublimely crude (ANIMAL HOUSE) rather than ridiculously crude (AMERICAN PIE), when the goal was celebrating an anarchic spirit rather than seeing how much bodily fluid you could get away with in an R-rated film. Pushing the envelope, Farrelly brothers-style, can be fun; stuffing the envelope to the point that it requires hundreds of dollars in postage can become a simple, wearying exercise in "can we get away with this?"
If you belong to that demographic that finds a joke most appealing when it's accompanied by a groan of disgust, have we got a treat for you. ROAD TRIP is framed as a tale of infamy told by a campus tour guide named Barry (Tom Green) at the fictional University of Ithaca. He tells of Josh Parker (Breckin Meyer), an earnest enough fellow in a long-distance relationship with a childhood sweetheart attending college in Austin, Texas. When Josh hooks up one night with Beth (Amy Smart) and videotapes their tryst, he thinks it's a momentary lapse ... until he discovers that one of his roommates has mailed the tape to his girlfriend Tiffany. Soon Josh and three pals -- libertine E.L. (Seann William Scott), brilliant Rubin (Paulo Costanzo) and geeky Kyle (DJ Qualls) -- are on the road for Austin, racing the clock to get to the tape before Tiffany returns to school from a family funeral.
I believe it should go without saying that the quartet takes a few detours before reaching Texas. Most of those detours involve the Sacred Duo of Collegiate Intemperance: mood-altering substances and sex. There's a stop to make deposits at a sperm bank when they run out of money. There's a stop at a college where they end up partying with members of a black fraternity, and where Kyle loses his virginity to a corpulent woman. And there's an overnight stay with an elderly couple where the grizzled man of the house gets stoned and hallucinates a conversation with his dog. It's a regular cornucopia of crudeness, choreographed by director Todd Phillips with all the voyeuristic vigor he demonstrated when choreographing (allegedly) the outrageous antics in the staged (allegedly) "documentary" FRAT HOUSE.
Only it's just not all that funny. Unlike the pointlessly message-mongering AMERICAN PIE, ROAD TRIP never pretends to be anything more than a cesspool of moral depravity. It's even refreshing in a twisted way that the girl who seduces Josh -- inspiring the cross-country recovery mission in the first place -- actually becomes the film's heroine, daring to suggest that sexually aggressive women can also be nice people. But ROAD TRIP's singularity of purpose doesn't translate into much manic energy. Its low-brow set pieces are pitched at obvious incongruities: the pairing of rail-thin Kyle with his substantial ladyfriend, an old man sporting an obvious erection, the macho E.L. delighting in a prostate massage. There's not much of a sense of comic discovery to ROAD TRIP's gags; they're the gags teenagers are expected to laugh at.
Deserved kudos do go to Tom Green, the MTV variety show host-cum-circus geek who plays the demented Barry. Green's act can be off-putting, but he's surprisingly funny as the perpetual undergrad with an unhealthy obsession with Rubin's pet python ("unleash the fury" has already become part of my film-based lexicon). His scenes are some of the only moments in ROAD TRIP where you can't be sure exactly what's going to happen next. The rest of this trip meanders through some extremely familiar countryside, and not familiar in a way that inspires fond comparisons to classic genre cousins. ROAD TRIP is comedy a level removed from anything that could be really funny, because it's all about how funny the mere idea of a profane, stoned dog could be. As the real classics of sophomoric humor have proved over the years, even when it comes to gross-outs, execution is everything.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 road squalors: 4.
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