Review by Matt Finley
After watching the trailer for Scott
Moore and Josh Lucas’ 21 AND OVER, which shamelessly touts
the movie’s connection to THE HANGOVER (“From the writers
of…”) and highlights a plot that looks more or less like that
film’s collegiate clone, it’s no surprise that the duo’s newest
outing (and directorial debut) runs a trio of debaucherous beta males
through an ethanol-soaked gauntlet of hijinks, coincidence and tepid
emotional epiphany.
Instead of an impending wedding, the
film races toward an imminent med school interview. Rather than a
missing groom, 21 AND OVER’s propelling MacGuffin is a
campus apartment belonging to 21st birthday boy and med school
applicant Jeff Chang (Justin Chong), to which his two visiting
buddies, Casey (Skylar Austin) and Miller (Miles Taylor) are
desperately attempting to return a blacked-out Chang for some
much-needed beauty rest. Boozing their way through a labyrinth of
ticked-off sorority pledges, adenoidal meatheads and campus police,
the three assess the crumbling state of their friendship as they
stare down the gullet of adulthood.
I guess what you really want to know
about a film like this is whether or not it’s funny. Perception
being subjective and all, 21 AND OVER is precisely as
funny as it looks. If drunk college kids puking in slow motion,
eating tampons, and stumbling across campus wearing naught but
loin-sheathing tube socks tweak your funny bone, you won’t be
disappointed. The film isn’t poorly assembled, and the
90-minute-runtime fits like a glove. I just wish it offered something
I hadn’t seen before.
Even as a mindless bit of boozy raunch,
it lacks the sheer force of character that permeated THE HANGOVER.
Perhaps it wouldn’t rankle so much if both (conscious) protagonists
didn’t feel like miscast understudies for two of that film’s
roles - Miller a pale facsimile of Bradley Cooper’s dickish,
impulsive Phil, and Casey a bland, neuroses-stripped analog for
Ed Helms’ reserved Stu. It doesn’t help that 21 AND OVER’s
several ethnic-themed gags (and, of course, that whole med school
interview bit) can’t help but recall HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO
WHITE CASTLE - a similarly sophomoric two-man comedy that’s
unflinching absurdity and winking commentary on the blanched, douchey
whiteness of its genre brethren runs circles around 21 AND OVER’s
formulaic comedy and, well, blanched, douchey whiteness.
As a purely utilitarian bonding agent
for all the beer-swilling bacchanalia, the film’s emotional arc is
appropriate enough. Where THE HANGOVER had a wedding and a
bride, 21 AND OVER has the school interview and an overbearing
father, but both are about the anxiety and nostalgia that wash over
men living in the looming shadows cast by landmarks of adulthood.
It’s a predictable Dear John letter to directionless freedom as
deliberate independence takes its place.
The real disappointment is Jeff Chang’s
story, which, from the moment his friends find a handgun in his
pocket, has the potential to offer a pointed and bleakly humorous
reflection on depression, and the difference between the healthy
angst that comes with growing up and the clinical pathologies that
can creep in and turn sadness into depression. Unfortunately,
after more than an hour of foreboding clues and dark intimations, the
whole thing fizzles out in thirty seconds of expositional dialogue
and a wash of major key pop music. It’s the single, obvious missed
opportunity in a movie that seems otherwise content to be an average
slug of insipid fun.
I was conflicted as to how to handle 21
AND OVER - it's no dumber than it's trying to be, and the
audience I watched it with seemed genuinely entertained (even clapped
at the end like at one of them snooty French cinema-movies).
Then I had my own moment of youthful
nostalgia: as a precocious 12-year-old, I once told my mom, who was
trying to dissuade me from some ridiculous, idiotic comedy by telling
me that critics hated it, that the one way you know a movie will be
good is if it got bad reviews. Whatever that movie was, I’m as sure
my mom would’ve loathed it as I am that I would have loved it. Mom
and Li’l Me, this is for you: (2 out of 4 Stars)
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