Project X

I am straining my brain to remember a movie as pointless as Project X, but I come up empty. I am also doing my best to remember if there is one redeemable moment in the film's 90 minutes, and again, I am drawing a blank. This is a cheap, worthless, and exploitive film with all the production values of one of those sex tapes you find on the Internet. That a major studio like Warner Bros. is selling this as entertainment (and as a comedy, no less) may be one of the biggest cinematic criminal acts in recent memory.

The movie is an exhausted retread of the raunchy formula about teenage friends who just want to get laid. The formula has worked in the past, as in Superbad, or the underrated Sex Drive. But it has also produced some very bad movies, and Project X may be the worst of the lot. This barely qualifies as a movie. It wants to depict three friends' sexual awakening during a wild birthday bash that goes out of control. But it forgets to focus on the friends, and instead turns into endless series of shots where we're watching nothing but random extras dancing, having sex, and doing drugs while dance and hip hop music blasts on the soundtrack. I'd say random footage of the extras doing the above makes up a good 75% of the middle section of the movie. The remaining 25% is even less interesting, believe it or not.

The film's central gimmick is that we're supposed to be watching the events of this wild party unfold live through the eyes of a kid with a handheld camera. The kid with the camera is Dax (Dax Flame), and he's videotaping the 17th birthday of Thomas (Thomas Mann). Thomas' foul mouthed and annoying best friend, Costa (Oliver Cooper), has set up this party so that they can get laid by the hottest girls at school. Also along for the ride is the overweight JB (Jonathan Daniel Brown), who I guess is supposed to be the "geek" of the group, but the movie forgets to give him a personality, or anything interesting to say. Thomas' parents are going to be gone for the weekend, so Costa decides to text every kid in school, and invite them to the party. They swipe some drugs from the neighborhood drug dealer, and grab some alcoholic beverages for the party to come.

Now, lots of movies have been built around wild parties that go out of control. But Project X is the first one I can remember where the party *is* the movie. As soon as the entire student body arrives to trash Thomas' house, the movie forgets all about characters, conflict, dialogue, and even coherency. We're simply watching some young actors having sex, flashing their breasts and privates to the camera, and getting high. To say that the movie becomes a monotonous bore would be an understatement. There's nothing to connect with up on the screen, because there's nothing up on the screen to begin with. This is the closest you can get to having nothing, and yet still have something to show for it. There is no conflict, very little dialogue, and next to no storytelling. It's simply 90 minutes of wish-fulfillment excess.

In the fantasyland that these character's inhabit, only the neighbor across the street complains about the excessive noise. No one else is ever seen. And the police are only seen in force when the deranged drug dealer (the one the kids stole from earlier) shows up with a flamethrower, and starts setting fire to the neighborhood. No, the police don't even show up when the kids set fire to certain parts of Thomas' house, or when they drive his dad's car into the pool. Well, surely, you ask, Thomas faces punishment from his parents for burning down the family home and destroying half the city block? Well, yes, but his dad takes it incredibly well. He even seems somewhat proud of his son. You see, at the beginning of the movie, before his parents leave for the weekend, we spy on a conversation they have, where his dad worries out loud that his son might be a loser. So, he almost sees this party as a sign that his son is growing up. Uh huh.

My problem with Project X is not that it's a filthy movie. I have enjoyed many a filthy movie in my time. My problem is that is probably the most pointless excuse for a movie I have ever sat through in my entire life. This is a movie that starts with a simple, yet workable idea, and then abandons it for one of those "teens gone wild" shows, where we're simply watching kids smoking, drinking, and having sex in excess. Nobody gets punished, nobody really gets hurt, and the movie tacks on some scenes at the end to show that Thomas and his friends are gonna be okay. And hey, they even get to be popular at school! That's this movie's idea of a happy ending, at least. I wonder how many people watching this will agree.

I have a feeling that Project X was somewhat inspired by the Jackass films, where a group of guys videotape themselves doing crude and disgusting pranks and dangerous stunts. Whereas the guys in those films usually try to squeeze some jokes into their sketches, this movie is just an endless slog of people behaving badly. I'm thinking they gave the Jackass title to the wrong movie.

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