After months of tolerating luke-warm studio pictures like “The Vow” or “This Means War” I was wondering if I was becoming soft or just becoming desperate to find enjoyment in anything. I kept finding myself walking out the theaters saying “well, it is what is it…” That is until I saw “Project X”, not only the worst movie I have seen so far this year, but a movie that will have a fighting chance to place as the number one spot on my years end bottom five.
Let me first preface this review by saying that I enjoy teen flicks. John Hughes is a personal hero of mine, and “Clueless” is un-ironically one of my all-time favorite movies. Hell, I even enjoy low brow teen party movies. I find myself constantly defending “Superbad”, and I even have a soft spot for movies like “American Pie”, “Can’t Hardly Wait”, and the first “House Party”. With that said, I cannot excuse “Project X” for its laziness, sloppiness, and overall cynical viewpoint towards it’s demographic.
What is there to say for the plot of “Projext X”? Thomas is turning 17 and his friends JB and Casta want to throw him the ultimate party to hopefully maximize their popularity and score some chicks. With this in mind they spend the better part of the daytime creating an internet viral campaign to get people to come to Thomas’s unsupervised house. They steal some drugs from an unhinged dealer, get some booze, and post signs near the pool that state that all swimmers must be nude. Before you know it, the house is full of inebriated teens, midgets, creepy 40 year olds, and the house dog tied to some helium balloons. Oh yeah, and did I mention it’s all done in a first person handi-cam style? So there’s that.
This might sound like every teen movie you have ever seen, but these characters are especially despicable people. Oliver Cooper who plays Casta, the supposed “funny guy”, who gets all the supposed “one-liners”, spends the better part of the movie insulting everyone and everything he runs into, being altogether homophobic and profoundly sexist. This in turn basically determines the overall tone of the movie; mean spirited and proud of it. The main character Thomas is blandly passive, wishy-washy and never really learns anything by the end of the movie. Not to mention all the girls in the film are basically brainless underwear models who are only there as concubines to be ogled at. What the movie lacks in stakes, story, characters, or a discernible arc, it tries to make up for in energy and attitude. What we are left with is a meaningless shell of the teen-party genre filled with boobs, booze and explosions.
Despite the fact that "Project X" was not very funny, I couldn't really tell if it was even trying to be, as there were no real discernible jokes to be had. Instead we had kids dancing, kids making out, kids doing drugs and kids insulting each other for 88 minutes. The funniest part of the film involves a midget punching a line of teen boys in the nards, and that’s not really saying anything. Oh yeah, and half way through, the found footage aspect of the movie makes absolutely no sense. Shots and angles are completely unaccounted for, as we see many sequences underwater and at least three lengthy montages. In fact, the movie looks more like an advertisement at times, which would make sense seeing as the director Nima Nourizadeh has mostly done commercial work prior to this.
The studio is marketing this as “Superbad” on crack. Sure I guess, if you don’t take into account Superbad’s love for its characters, dialogue driven humor, or its ultimate message about growing up and growing apart. But even as I endured this pile, I sat in my theater seat with the full knowledge that teens and frat-boys are going to violently defend “Project X”. Why is that? Well for one it reaffirms the white privileged teenage fantasy that all the girls will flock to dance music and booze no matter how nerdy you are, and that popping pills and destroying your neighborhood is not only awesome but even excusable by the law if you’re underage. All lies, by the way. Secondly, people will ignore how stupid and painfully egotistic this movie is because it’s loud and it moves, and unfortunately most people would rather watch a bad movie than a slow movie.
Grade: F
Originally Published in The Idaho State Journal/March-2012
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