Chase the Sex Tape

American Pie wasn’t the first teen sex comedy, not nearly by a long shot, but it did rejuvenate the genre and give it fresh legs. In a way it’s like how Scream (which came out just a couple of years earlier) gave new life to the slasher genre. Before Scream, the slasher genre was considered well and truly dead. After, though, it inspired a whole new wave of slashers, from new franchises and old, to fill theaters. American Pie did similarly, and a fresh wave of teen sex comedies made their way into theaters to raunch it up and party like kids with freshly baked pies.

Within a year of American Pie’s release, we had all kinds of new comedies coming out to try and capitalize on that sweet, fresh baked goods, raunchy money. One of the first to try and capitalize on the success was Road Trip, a 2000 comedy written and directed by Todd Phillips and, in a way, it’s also one of the first true successors to American Pie. It had the raunch, it had the nudity, it had people making fools of themselves for sex. Hell, it even had Stifler, more or less, as Sean William Scott came in to play a character that was essentially his American Pie character in all but name. It was engineered, in effect, to make money.

There was just one small problem: the film was not funny. While there are flaws with American Pie (which we discussed extensively in my review of that film), there is no doubt that many of the jokes, skits, and situations were at least chuckle-worthy. The same could not be said for Road Trip. It was Phillips’s first directorial effort and while you can tell it’s trying, desperately, to be like American Pie, it didn’t have the same humor, or gusto, to pull off its material. It’s less amusing, and less interesting, than its inspiration, making for a far less enjoyable experience.

Josh Parker (Breckin Meyer) and Tiffany Henderson (Rachel Blanchard) have been together since forever. Neighbors and friends since kindergarten, the two started dating in middle school, and have been together ever since. Unfortunately for them, Josh ended up going to Ithaca University in New York while Tiffany went to the veterinary program at the University of Austin in Texas (it’s important to note Austin, TX, as at least one character in the film struggled with that detail). This put a strain on their relationship, and Josh could feel Tiffany pulling away, not calling him back like she normally would, every day. This left Josh feeling adrift.

And in walks Beth Wagner (Amy Smart), a friend and classmate of Josh who clearly has the hots for Josh. After a party they attended, Beth ends up at Josh’s dorm room and, since Tiffany hasn’t been calling him back, he assumes they broke up. Beth decides to tape their night together (on VHS with Josh’s camcorder), and the next day, in a bit of confusion, the tape that Josh made for Tiffany gets swapped with the sex tape with Beth, mailed to Tiffany that morning. Josh freaks out, especially after he gets a call from Tiffany where she explains that she was out for the last week because her grandfather died. Seeing no other recourse, Josh and his friends – Seann William Scott as E.L. Faldt, Paulo Costanzo as Rubin Carver, and DJ Qualls as Kyle Edwards – hop in a car and head out for the 48 hour drive to Austin to get the sex tape back before Tiffany sees it.

To be blunt, a major issue I had with this movie was the characters. These guys are pretty shitty people. The most obvious is Josh, who decides to sleep with another girl just because his long-term, likely end up marrying (at least he thinks) girlfriend of over a decade hasn’t called him back in a few days. He takes that as her breaking up with him, but she hasn’t said those words, and he hasn’t either, so the whole situation in the film happens because he just decides to blow her off and get into the panties of the first girl that shows any interest in him. It’s a pretty shitty move and, frankly, whatever happens to him after that he deserves.

This would be fine if the film punished Josh more for this incident. The film, though, wants us to like him and think of him as our protagonist. Other people in the film suffer for their actions during the course, in various ways, but Josh surprisingly remains above the fray for the most part. He goes on the road trip, gets to Austin, and then ends up talking things out with Tiffany so that (spoilers for a 25 year old movie) he can then end up with Beth in the end. And don’t get me wrong, Breckin Meyer and Amy Smart have solid chemistry in this film. It’s just surprising to me that the worst Josh has to face in this film is driving to and from Austin. That’s really it.

There were ways the film could have punished him. Tiffany could have been mad at him. Beth could have been mad at him. He could have ended up single for being a shitty person to both girls (because, let’s face it, he was). Hell, he even had to skip studying for an upcoming midterm for a full week (to say nothing of skipping all his other classes during that span) and yet he still passes the test and doesn’t suffer any other academic penalties either. And while losing his degree would have been too harsh a punishment for him cheating on his girlfriend, you’d at least expect there to be some kind of consequence for him. There just isn’t.

The reason the film can get away, at all, with treating Josh as the protagonist is because everyone else around him is shittier. Scott’s E.L. Faldt is Stifler with even less charm and fewer redeeming qualities. Scott can work a couple of funny lines out of him, but for the most part his character is underwritten and annoying and Scott can only do so much with the material. Costanzo’s Rubin Carver isn’t any better, being less funny even if he’s also less obnoxious. He’s basically a yes man for E.L., agreeing with all the shitty and misogynistic things the character says. Oh, and he gets high a lot. There aren’t any jokes about this, him just smoking pot is supposed to be funny on its own.

And then there’s Tom Green as Barry, and Green is in this film because he was popular at the time and, well, that’s really it. Watching his performance in this film, which is somehow both completely dead eyed and also, somehow, turned to 11, I have to think they brought him in and then said, “improvise all your lines.” Green is here, like Scott, because the producers wanted a draw for the film, they just didn’t have any ideas how to use him. He’s obnoxious, and not funny at all, and every time he came on screen I found myself looking at my phone because I couldn’t stand watching his character.

Really, the only redeeming character is DJ Qualls’s Kyle Edwards who is a sweet, nerdy kid that the other guys use and abuse. He’s a nice guy who ends up with a girl he really likes, Mia Amber Davis’s Rhonda, and the film mocks him for it because she’s a plus-sized girl. She’s sweet to him, and they actually seem good together, but she’s fat and that’s the whole of the joke. It’s really shitty, but then being shitty is the whole of this film’s humor, so that’s truly just par for the course with this film.

It’s not that Road Trip is poorly made or poorly directed. It’s perfectly serviceable from a production standpoint, and blends in well in that regard with other films of the genre. But the fact is that this film sucks. It’s not funny, the characters are not likable, and the only thing it had going for it at the time to compete with other films of the genre was a liberal amount of nudity. That is not enough to save this film, and you could tell audiences agreed. Teed up to be as big of a hit as American Pie, the film could only make half what that film made, a successful (but not smashing) $119.8 Mil against its $16 Mil budget. That means it turned a profit, but it clearly wasn’t what the studio, Dreamworks, was hoping for from this film. It was only years later, in 2009, that a sequel was even made, and that was released direct-to-video. And then the series was never heard from again.