Has anyone seen any of the myriad commercials or trailers for Road Trip? If so, then the best parts of the movie are gone. Road Trip follows in the tradition of There's Something About Mary and American Pie by using extremely crude humor, but fails to generate any of the surprising warmth of the other two movies. But, since those two movies were so successful, expect a barrage of lesser imitations, each one trying to outgross the other. So far this year, Road Trip trawls along the bottom.
Josh (Breckin Meyer, Go!, 54) has a problem. He though his girlfriend Tiffany (Rachel Blanchard, Sugar and Spice, The Rage: Carrie 2) broke up with him. Feeling confused, he ended up having sex with Beth (Amy Smart, Varsity Blues, Outside Providence) and recorded it. His roommate mistakenly sent the tape of Beth and Josh to Tiffany, right after Josh learned that Tiffany did not break up with him. Now, he has to travel from Ithaca, New York, to Austin, Texas to retrieve the tape and save his relationship before Tiffany sees it. Beth, feeling guilty, tries to find Tiffany herself, to confess her actions.
Thus is born the road trip, the grand college tradition that here, has an ulterior purpose. E.L. (Seann William Scott, American Pie, Final Destination) doesn't think so, he just wants to have fun. On the other hand, Kyle (DJ Qualls, Cherry Falls), the repressed nerd, only comes along because the car is his. Barry (MTV's Tom Green), the narrator, stays behind to wreak his own unique type of havoc. Most of the characters are pretty forgettable. Meyer and his character are both bland and forgettable, and Scott plays the same horny teenager he did in American Pie. Qualls and Green are funnier. Qualls, mainly because his character is so out of place and lands in the strangest situations. Kyle is nervous, inhumanly skinny, and a virgin, and by the end of the movie, not all those stay the same. Green's humor elicits a love/hate reaction. On MTV, he usually sets out specifically to annoy people, but here, his anarchy serves a purpose.
Everything else in the script by director Todd Phillips (Bittersweet Motel) and Scot Armstrong is fairly forgettable. Each crude bathroom joke blends into the next, separated only by which type of bodily function is involved. The humor does not deal with anything particularly funny, just how outrageous things can get. Granted, some of it works but not much. Although Road Trip takes place in college, it probably belongs in junior high.