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Last Updated: Nov 14, 2008 - 12:49:26 PM |
* out of five
It is quite easy to argue that I hated Sex Drive because I am not, and never have been, a boy between the ages of 14 and 21 years old, and so I do not empathize with the situations presented in the film. But when it comes down to it, the truth is that I hated Sex Drive because it’s a lazy, half-hearted piece of filmmaking that clumps together pieces from other, better comedies of years past and hopes that pure raunch will be enough to keep it afloat.
This is a common mistake in the teen sex movie genre, which usually walks a very fine line between crude and charming. Sex Drive has the crudeness down pat; it strives valiantly for the charm, but stumbles every time it nears a moment of genuine emotion.
Josh Zuckerman is Ian, who remains a virgin at 18 and whose situation is presented as being comparable to a leper’s. He’s been chatting up an internet hottie named Ms_Tasty, who promises him that she’ll “go all the way” if he agrees to drive down from Chicago to Knoxville for her. This requires (a) stealing his homophobic brother Rex’s (James Marsden) pristine 1969 GTO and (b) taking best friend Lance (Clark Duke) and platonic girl friend Felicia (Amanda Crews) along for the ride.
None of this is even remotely new or original, and the unfolding of proceedings will shock no one. The only thing that makes Sex Drive more complex than a child’s connect-the-dots puzzle is the sheer variety of shenanigans our leads find themselves in. A sampling: arrests, urination in a radiator, solicitation of sex in a bathroom, an Amish rumschpringe party (complete with the most useless cameo ever by band Fall Out Boy), an insane hitchhiker, drag racing. Sadly, this list is not exhaustive. Sex Drive is full of ludicrous, and not particularly humorous, situations. It’s like director/writer Sean Anders and writer John Morris marathoned every teen sex movie from the past two decades, wrote down every joke in them, upped the offensiveness factor by ten and removed the humor, and then threw them into one movie.
The acting isn’t terrible, which makes the glaring faults of the writing and plot that much worse. The leads are all tired types: Zuckerman is the geeky everyman; Duke is a loathsome Jonah Hill-lite, scoring girls via the tried-and-true method of being a jerk; and Crews, being the token female, alternately pines and sulks on the fringes of the film. And floating around in the background are wastes of side characters, each with their own single joke: Kim Ostrenko is the recipient of several condom-and-bodily-fluid gags; James Marsden is a walking dictionary of gay slurs; and Seth Green, in a slight concession to originality as an Amish man who misses sarcasm, is forced to keep harping on the same theme over and over.
Of course, one usually shouldn’t have high standards for the teen sex comedy – hardly the highwater point of humorous cinema. But even when Sex Drive takes aim at the low standards of the genre, it can’t hit the mark.
Sex Drive runs 109 minutes and is rated R for strong crude and sexual content, nudity, language, some drug and alcohol use, all involving teens. Viewed at Southpark 16.
ereel@villagepublishing.com | 751-0421
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