The writers of The Hangover turn director with another elaborate tale of a drunken night’s debauchery, and the results are even unfunnier than you’d fear.
Driven pre-med student Jeff Chang (Justin Chon) gets an unwelcome surprise on his 21st birthday when his best friends from high school, Miller (Miles Teller) and Casey (Skylar Astin), arrive on his doorstep to party. He, however, needs an early night because his fearsome father Dr Chang (Francois Chau from LOST) has arranged an interview for medical school at 7am the next morning. Bullied by the coarse Miller Jeffrey cracks and gets very, very drunk. When he passes out Miller and Casey realise they don’t know where he lives. And so begins an odyssey thru sorority houses, frat parties, pep rallies – quite often in the company of Jeffrey’s friend Nicole (Sarah Wright) – to try and find someone who can give them an address to deliver the comatose Jeffrey to. But the strained friendships threaten to fracture from drunkenly revealed secrets…
This is the type of R-rated comedy which believes that comedy is derived from being crude and being obnoxious, not from being witty or, God forbid, delivering jokes. If you have to explain a joke it’s not funny – yet writer/directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore actually do that for the one successful joke in their movie thereby semi-ruining it. 21 and Over has some mildly amusing moments in its final act, but then you realise you’re responding to them because they’re shamelessly cribbed from the finale of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – Jeff’s dad roars towards chez Chang while a semi-conscious Jeff tries to make it home first – not because anything funny is happening. Russell Hodgkinson has a wonderful character moment as The Chief, but, like the lyrical image of a buffalo wandering around the campus, it deserves a better film.
I’ve written before that Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill always add a rambling absurdity to their R-rated comedy, and this film actually attempts that approach with a discussion of JGL; but it fails miserably. There also appears to be a nod to 50 Shades of Grey in the sorority sequences, but then the pay-off is Eyes Wide Shut. Really this film is all about Miller – an incredibly obnoxious character who is racist towards Asians, Latinos, Jews, and, well, everyone really. Amidst the slow-motion vomiting while riding a bull, the stretchy member involved in an accidental circumcision, and the inexplicably topless cheerleader, you’ll think two things. Rogen mis-fired when he tried to use an obnoxious lead in The Green Hornet, yet this film, like The Change-Up and The Hangover doesn’t think it needs to make its protagonist likeable. Or, indeed, the supporting characters; the abrasive jock Randy (Jonathan Keltz) is as unnervingly plausible as Bradley Cooper’s Wedding Crashers thug. Characters can be compelling rather than likeable, but that’s really a dramatic prerogative. And, after The Hangover and The Change-Up, this is yet another paean to permanent adolescence by Lucas and Moore, and ironically these asinine, simplistic, foul-mouthed and predictable valorisations of irresponsibility are just getting old…
Did you know that it’s just over 10 years since The Rules of Attraction was released in Ireland? Why not catch up with that classic of cinematic college debauchery?
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