There have been lots of movies about big parties over the years, but usually they end up being more about the events surrounding the big party than the party itself. Recently we’ve seen successes like Superbad, which is all about a couple of guys trying to get to a party that could change their lives, and The Hangover, in which a group of guys deal with the aftermath of a disastrous blowout. Project X is unique in that it isn’t a story happening around a party; the party itself is the entire movie. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. A movie like 12 Angry Men isn’t anything more than 12 guys sitting in one room, and it’s fascinating for its entire runtime. Limiting the scope of your storytelling can be an interesting way to really dig into a subject and get to the heart of your characters. Theoretically. But then there’s disposable movies like Project X. Its story really doesn’t go much deeper than watching people party, and the characters, they mostly just exist as our excuse to present said partying. Watching this movie is a lot like getting stuck being the designated driver. And, as everyone knows, being the designated driver is the worst. If I can’t drink, then I’m not going. You guys can take a cab.
Our protagonist is named Thomas (Thomas Mann), and he’s generally the most likable of our crew. He’s the skinny, unspectacular kid that can’t get noticed. And though we hear from both his parents and his friends that he’s a loser, he seems more like a kid that just hasn’t found his thing, that hook that’s going to make him memorable to his peers. Hence the party. Thomas and his friends believe that if they can throw him the biggest, ragingest birthday party of all time, he’s bound to become the thing of high school legend. It’s a dumb plan, yeah, but Thomas is just dopey enough that you don’t really hold it against him. And even later in the film, when he gets a little bit of social clout and uses it to trample all over a nice girl’s feelings by canoodling with the slutty, hot chick, you still don’t hate him too much. He was well established as being in over his head and played it well enough that I didn’t believe he would have had the wherewithal to turn down the sudden sexual advances of a budding underwear model once they happen; so even when he pulls a jerk move there’s still a part of you that likes him. They could have done a lot worse picking a male lead.
Thomas’ best friend Costa (Oliver Cooper) is a different story. At one point, when asked about the impending party, a side character responds, “Is this that thing the dick in the sweater vest was telling us about?” It seems that somebody involved on some level of the writing process knew that in Costa they had created an insufferable turd of a character. Costa is a tough talking little goon who could best be described as the results of Jeremy Piven and a Jager Bomb having a baby, and every second he’s on screen you spend fantasizing that you’re choking him. Repeatedly we’re asked to laugh at his antics, and repeatedly my reaction was instead to want to slap him upside his head. It’s strange to me that, if the screenwriters were aware of how obnoxious he is, they wouldn’t make the effort to soften the character rather than just make self-referential comments about him being a dick. I guess that would have been too much work though.
The fat kid, JB (Jonathan Daniel Brown), seemed to only be in this movie so the other characters could call him fat. Seemingly, the filmmakers just needed to be certain that you would hate the Costa character, so they put this kid in as his walking punching bag to really hammer home what an obnoxious jerk he can be. I don’t know what to say about Brown’s performance other than he was acceptably chunky, and he takes the verbal abuse well.
Kirby Bliss Blanton, on the other hand, doesn’t fit her role so well. She’s playing the chick friend who hangs out with our trio of dorks like she’s just another one of the dudes. She’s got a romantic fixation on Thomas, but nobody really notices her because she’s just their dumb friend who’s been around forever. Bullshit. I know it’s industry standard that the girls playing these roles are always more attractive than they should be, but this is just ridiculous. Blanton is angelic in her beauty, and the idea that she’s hanging around these three guys all the time and they’re not spending every waking moment obsessing over how they can curry her favor is patently absurd.
The casting of Blanton as the hopeless Tomboy isn’t where the absurdity ends though. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to unbelievable nonsense. Nothing that happens over the course of this film is remotely believable. No aspect of the party that gets thrown could ever really happen. And I know that’s sort of the point, that you’re supposed to just turn your brain off and enjoy how over the top things get, but here things get so over the top that in order to accept what they’re feeding you it would be necessary not just to turn off your brain, but to turn it off, throw it on the ground, and stomp on it until it’s a bloody, chunky mess. The fact that all of these people would show up to some random high school kid’s birthday party makes no sense and is never explained away, the idea that a party one-eighth the size of this one could ever happen in the middle of an affluent suburb without a swarm of cops instantly showing up and shutting it down is ludicrous... and where the heck does that zip line that people are taking from the roof into the pool come from? Ridiculous!
What is and isn’t logistical isn’t the main reason I found the way this party is depicted to be unacceptable though. What’s unacceptable is what pure, unadulterated, wish-fulfillment hokum this is. There’s no struggle in this movie, no conflict. The three kids need to throw a raging party in order to be popular, and then it just happens without them having to do any work. The party gets too big and becomes out of their control, but they never have to deal with any of the consequences of that. A simple damn the man battle cry and a thrusting of a red solo cup into the air as everyone cheers is enough to explain away the fact that they should be going to prison for a very long time. Everything comes so easily to these kids, and they so immediately start indulging in the decadent lifestyle of their adolescent fantasies that they just become smug little asses over the course of the film. Audiences want to root for the underdog, to watch someone struggle against adversity and triumph, not just sit idly by as an inert protagonist’s dreams systematically come true. That’s boring.
And this movie is so needlessly long that it becomes beyond boring by the time the third act rolls around. Not that there’s any traditional three act structure going on here. Mostly what we’re watching is just endless scenes of crazy things happening at a party. I don’t know exactly how many montages of people having fun at a party you can watch without getting bored, but it’s about a dozen less than this movie thinks. The pacing is so glacial that I thought I had been watching for somewhere around two hours when I checked my watch for the first time, but I was only 55 minutes in. Honestly, once a crazy man with a flame thrower shows up and things started getting destructive on an epic level I perked up a little bit, but it comes late, and by that point I was near comatose. There was so much stuff in here that could have easily been edited out so I didn’t have to watch the last third of the film through squinted eyes I was struggling to keep open; but alas, it wasn’t.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike Project X. I haven’t even gotten into the stuff that people might find offensive—that the kids essentially try to kill a dog, that the movie treats a midget being locked in an oven as a gag, or that a post-script joke is made at the expense of the mentally handicapped—but I should mention before ending this review that there were a few things that I liked. This movie is chock full of well cast boobs, which is always a plus. Sure, it’s a little creepy that the nudity is coming from girls who are portrayed as being high school students, but the actresses are all clearly old enough to be getting topless in a movie, so it mostly works as a bonus. The soundtrack is kind of fun too. The music that kids today listen to is so bad, and this movie is trying so hard to be current, that you would think it would be full of unlistenable crap; but they actually trade what’s popular for what would make a legitimately good party playlist. Also, I found it pretty funny that James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’ was randomly playing in the background of a scene where the boys go to a seedy drug lair. That’s it though; other than the songs and the boobs there isn’t much to like about this rock dumb movie.
If, however, you’re looking for a second opinion, I submit this review from the 17-year-old dude with droopy drawers that was walking out of the theater in front of me: “That was the best f---ing movie I’ve ever seen.”
Trust who you will.
