Each time I exit the theater after a screening, representatives from the studio are poised with eager notepads and impatient pens to record my thoughts. I usually try to have some pithy soundbite ready. It gives me something to do during the credits. As I made my way out of Sex Drive a few weeks back, I was feeling particularly snarky. “I just wasted two hours watching that film,” I told them, feigning grief, “and now I have to go home and waste two more writing about it.”
Poor Ian (Josh Zuckerman). His life seems to be one example of Murphy’s Law after another. His misogynistic, alpha-dog older brother Rex (James Marsden channeling Bill Paxton’s Chet from Weird Science) ridicules him endlessly about his lack of female companionship. If that weren’t bad enough, his 14-year-old younger brother is scoring girlfriends left and right. Just weeks away from the start of college, it looks like straight-laced Ian will be leaving home a virgin.
Not if he and Ms. Tasty can help it. If her chat room picture is to be trusted, Ms. Tasty is a gorgeous blonde in Knoxville, Tennessee, and only too happy to help Ian with his…predicament. The only problem is that Ian lives in Chicago. Stealing Rex’s prized, vintage Pontiac GTO, Ian packs his two best friends, Felicia (Amanda Crew), who he’s obviously in love with, and Lance (Clark Duke), the most suave geek alive, into the car and sets off on the 500 mile road trip.
As they say, the journey and not the destination, is the truly important thing. Especially when that journey involves such misadventures and raunchy escapades as catastrophic car trouble, being tossed in jail, attacked by cuckolded husbands, humiliated at a roadside carnival, and thrown to the mercy of Amish farmers.
My mother always told me that if I didn’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. But as criticism is my job, and as my editor is not predisposed to a vast chuck of white in the middle of his newspaper, I propose a compromise. I’ll lead with praise and leave the censure for later.
Clark Duke, as Ian’s best friend, is one of the more original characters I’ve seen in a while. Duke’s Lance would be the consummate dweeb if he weren’t so shockingly confident in his prowess, sexual or otherwise. Overweight and bespectacled, Lance nonetheless carries himself with a devil-may-care demeanor that wins over male and female hecklers alike. Seth Green (Dr. Evil’s son from the Austin Powers films) plays an Amish expert on cars who spent some time among “the English” and misses sarcasm. Green’s bits are particularly funny.
Alright, enough of that. Sex Drive is little more than a cheap knock off of so many other raunchy gross-out films. These days, it’s like a battle of the studios to see who can make the crudest movie. Yes, of course there are some funny moments. The extreme margins of anything are nearly always funny precisely because they do not fall within accepted norms. But the law of diminishing returns requires that we have to keep going out further and further, pushing the boundaries back more and more to find humor, be it racial, cultural, sexual, gender, etc. One of these times the margins are going to give way and we’re going to topple over the side. After watching Sex Drive the other night, I wanted to turn on my most condescending voice, place my hands on my hips, and exclaim contemptuously, “Oh grow up Hollywood!”
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
