Sex Drive

I would like to offer a simple piece of advice to anyone currently writing a teen sex comedy, or maybe thinking of writing one. See Sex Drive. Study it. Learn from it. Not only will your movie be better, your audience will be happier. With uninspired imitations like College out there, it's easy to forget that there's laughs still to be found in the genre. There are certainly a lot of big laughs in Sex Drive, as well as a surprising amount of heart and characters who have been written as real people. It was surprising how much I cared about these characters by the end of the film.

What writer-director Sean Anders, along with his co-writer John Morris, do here is take the standard formula for the teen sex road trip comedy, and then turn it on its head with a strong sense of absurd humor, and an underlying level of sweetness. The characters also are not arch types that follow the rules. The lead character is Ian (Josh Zuckerman), an 18-year-old virgin who is tired of seeing his best friend Lance (Clark Duke) get all the girls, and his 14-year-old brother score with the girl he likes at work. When he's not facing humiliation at the hands of his psychotic older brother Rex (James Marsden), he faces humiliation on a daily basis at his fast food job, where he has to walk around the mall in a foam costume of the restaurant's mascot, Senor Donut, and hand out coupons to uninterested customers. He has another best friend named Felicia (Amanda Crew), who likes Ian, but doesn't know how to admit her feelings. Ian, meanwhile, has been carrying on an on line relationship with a girl who calls herself "Ms. Tasty" (Katrina Bowden) for a while now. When she suggests they meet in person, Ian is encouraged by Lance to swipe Rex's classic '69 GTO car, and go on a road trip to Knoxville, TN. where the girl waits. Felicia comes along for the ride as well, under the impression that Ian and Lance are going to visit Ian's grandmother.

As the old saying goes, it's not the destination, it's the journey that makes Sex Drive work. This is a movie that starts predictably, and then builds into something else all together. When the three friends stumble upon an Amish community that is heavily into drunken rave parties, I knew the filmmakers were onto something. And let me tell you, if you don't laugh at the sight of two drunken Amish women kissing in the middle of a mosh pit, you've lost your sense of the absurd. The sequence is topped off with a winning performance by Seth Green as Ezekiel, an Amish farmer who knows a surprising amount about sports cars, and who peppers every line of dialogue with verbal slaps of sarcasm. There are so many inventive little gags that caught me off guard in this movie. The climax, in particular, is a work of genius in the way it not only brings everything together into one hilarious finale, but also in the way it manages to throw everything at once without falling into chaos. You can almost picture writers Anders and Morris sweating it out as they tried to piece the scene together. Their effort pays off, and the final 15 minutes of the movie deliver some of the biggest laughs since Tropic Thunder.

And while the movie never quite forgets what it's supposed to be (there are a couple gross out shots, but compared to most recent comedies of its type, this movie seems pretty tame), there is some genuine emotion going through these characters. Ian is not played as the typical "loser" type who usually populates these movies. He's a sensitive guy who's tired of being overlooked by everyone and playing it safe, and wants to do something crazy and spontaneous for once. Rising young star Josh Zuckerman (previously seen in Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs) has a nice everyman quality to him, and makes Ian into a character we can relate with as well as laugh at. The male best friend character in these movies is usually a boorish sex-crazed lout, but Clark Duke brings a surprising amount of humanity to Lance. There's a scene where the two actually talk about Ian's complicated relationship with Felicia, and they talk like...well, people who've been friends for years and understand each other. And while on the subject, Amanda Crew is a real find as Felicia, creating an instant chemistry with Zuckerman, and really grabbing the viewer's attention.

In lesser hands, I can easily imagine this movie being a total disaster. After all, it's a daunting challenge to balance human emotion, outlandish over-the-top humor, and crude sex farce in the same movie. Sex Drive pulls it off by know just how far to push, and when to pull back. It certainly shows intelligence on the side of the filmmakers, and quickly clues you in that this is not your typical "dumb" teen comedy. It's also nice in this day and age to see a movie that actually knows how to build up to gags, and make them work without dragging them out. The movie actually at times seems to be self-aware of the jokes that don't work, and quickly cuts away from them, or doesn't waste a lot of time on them. (A scene where Ian has an unfortunate encounter with a gay man in a public restroom probably should have been left on the cutting room floor.) Still, like any good comedy, there's always a scene around the corner to bring the movie back into our favor whenever it takes an occasional wrong step.

With Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and now this, October has been a good month for surprisingly intelligent teen movies built on simple or cliched premises. Sex Drive is not exactly great or skillful filmmaking, and it doesn't pretend to be. It just wants to make us laugh, and given some of the recent comedies to come out of Hollywood, that's harder than expected. This is a movie with a surprising amount of laughs, an equally surprising amount of heart, and more brain than you might first expect.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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