Grade: C
Yin: Narrative is thinner than the paper the script was printed on. Performances were ripped so thoroughly from 2007’s Superbad that they trot into parody. Rarely funny from a narrative or character perspective, but more for sheer audacity.
Yang: Audacious and over the top to a fault. Not the most shocking party ever committed to film, but pretty close. You’ll forget almost everything about this flick except for the sheer carnage—and that’s saying something.
In-Between: Anything you did wrong as a teen pales in comparison to this party.
Pop culture analysis-wiki TV Tropes defines the concept of "Refuge in Audacity" as an approach to storytelling in which characters in a narrative can display immoral, illogical, or impossible behavior of the highest most off-the-wall order simply due to the sheer implausibility of such behavior.
Rookie director Nima Nourizadeh’s found footage experience, Project X, takes more than refuge in audacity; it hunkers down in its bosom for the long haul.
Produced by frat pack ‘auteur’ Todd Phillips, Project X is not so much a narrative, but a, roughly, 90-minute spectacle that allows viewers to experience the sickest—I mean that in both connotations—party ever committed to film. Project X follows three friends pulled straight from the mold of proto-Project X, Superbad, as the plan an epic birthday bash for Michael Cera knock off Thomas (Thomas Mann) while his parents are out of town. While Thomas takes the central role as the awkward nice guy, he is flanked by his motor-mouthed, tragically unhip buddy, from Queens, Costa (Oliver Cooper)—our Jonah Hill substitute—and chubby, even more awkward J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown)—think Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s McLovin with Jonah Hill’s old waistline. The early going follows the three as they take the requisite steps of planning: invite girls, hire a DJ, invite girls, buy drugs, invite girls, warn the neighbors, invite girls. With everything in place, the boys are expecting about 50 heads to stroll through Thomas’ parents’ Pasadena McMansion, but thanks to Costa’s prodigious advertising efforts the guest list swells to over 1000. Chaos of the highest order, literally, ensues.
For anyone who fancies themselves a mature adult, the happenings in Project X are a nightmare. For anyone who is 18, or 18 at heart, this is the greatest party you never got to attend. Beer flows like water. Breasts are bared. Midgets are stuffed in ovens. Virgins are deflowered. Bones are broken. Blood is spilled. Cars are crashed. Fires rage. The amount of energy and time devoted to documenting this chaotic party essentially diminishes any sense of narrative, which, to be honest, is nothing more than a limp rehash of the same old high school losers try to get laid and become popular narrative—right up to Thomas being forced to choose between the girl next door and the hottest girl in school. Unwisely, Nourizadeh--through the mostly steady lens of suspiciously parent-less amateur documentarian, Dax (Dax Flame)—spends more time building the spectacle to an insane crescendo than building character or even consistent humor—there were significant stretches of time where the screening audience sat dead silent, more bemused than amused. It is apt that Project X is a found footage film because it is essentially a horror movie. We don’t care about the characters we just want to see how out of hand this party can get, and on that level, Nourizadeh does not disappoint.
With all the focus on the near-anarchy of the party, performances pretty much slip into sketches. The main three are essentially draft versions of the main characters from Superbad, lacking any of the slight—very slight—nuance that Cera, Hill and Mintz-Plasse brought to Superbad. Oliver Cooper’s Coasta was likely framed as the breakout character—what with his Pimp Cup and blisteringly foul tongue—but he is so hopelessly uncool and lacking in self-awareness that you have to wonder if this isn’t a calculated parody of those instigating horndogs from prior party movies. Mann and Brown, unfortunately, shrink in Cooper’s presence by being so relatively passive, leaving the audience with little reason to invest in either. The only performances that truly deserve highlighting belong to Nick Nervies and Brady Hender as two overeager pre-teen security guards for the party. Nervies and Hender sell their to dedication to the point of overselling, but their attempts to ‘safeguard’ the party from threats that are consistently bigger than them leads to some of the film’s few purely hysterical moments.
Performances aside, Project X is not really a bad movie because it is not really a movie; it is an experience. As the second found footage movie in as many month’s it lacks the narrative ambition of the much smarter and more focused Chronicle, but it comes thisclose to matching the destruction and carnage of Chronicle’s climax, only on a more grounded scale. Occasionally funny, narratively bankrupt, but shockingly, to a fault, audacious, Project X will never be confused as the touchstone of a generation, but it is undoubtedly a disturbingly magnificent, over-the-top encapsulation of the teen party fantasy writ large.
Rookie director Nima Nourizadeh’s found footage experience, Project X, takes more than refuge in audacity; it hunkers down in its bosom for the long haul.
Produced by frat pack ‘auteur’ Todd Phillips, Project X is not so much a narrative, but a, roughly, 90-minute spectacle that allows viewers to experience the sickest—I mean that in both connotations—party ever committed to film. Project X follows three friends pulled straight from the mold of proto-Project X, Superbad, as the plan an epic birthday bash for Michael Cera knock off Thomas (Thomas Mann) while his parents are out of town. While Thomas takes the central role as the awkward nice guy, he is flanked by his motor-mouthed, tragically unhip buddy, from Queens, Costa (Oliver Cooper)—our Jonah Hill substitute—and chubby, even more awkward J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown)—think Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s McLovin with Jonah Hill’s old waistline. The early going follows the three as they take the requisite steps of planning: invite girls, hire a DJ, invite girls, buy drugs, invite girls, warn the neighbors, invite girls. With everything in place, the boys are expecting about 50 heads to stroll through Thomas’ parents’ Pasadena McMansion, but thanks to Costa’s prodigious advertising efforts the guest list swells to over 1000. Chaos of the highest order, literally, ensues.
For anyone who fancies themselves a mature adult, the happenings in Project X are a nightmare. For anyone who is 18, or 18 at heart, this is the greatest party you never got to attend. Beer flows like water. Breasts are bared. Midgets are stuffed in ovens. Virgins are deflowered. Bones are broken. Blood is spilled. Cars are crashed. Fires rage. The amount of energy and time devoted to documenting this chaotic party essentially diminishes any sense of narrative, which, to be honest, is nothing more than a limp rehash of the same old high school losers try to get laid and become popular narrative—right up to Thomas being forced to choose between the girl next door and the hottest girl in school. Unwisely, Nourizadeh--through the mostly steady lens of suspiciously parent-less amateur documentarian, Dax (Dax Flame)—spends more time building the spectacle to an insane crescendo than building character or even consistent humor—there were significant stretches of time where the screening audience sat dead silent, more bemused than amused. It is apt that Project X is a found footage film because it is essentially a horror movie. We don’t care about the characters we just want to see how out of hand this party can get, and on that level, Nourizadeh does not disappoint.
With all the focus on the near-anarchy of the party, performances pretty much slip into sketches. The main three are essentially draft versions of the main characters from Superbad, lacking any of the slight—very slight—nuance that Cera, Hill and Mintz-Plasse brought to Superbad. Oliver Cooper’s Coasta was likely framed as the breakout character—what with his Pimp Cup and blisteringly foul tongue—but he is so hopelessly uncool and lacking in self-awareness that you have to wonder if this isn’t a calculated parody of those instigating horndogs from prior party movies. Mann and Brown, unfortunately, shrink in Cooper’s presence by being so relatively passive, leaving the audience with little reason to invest in either. The only performances that truly deserve highlighting belong to Nick Nervies and Brady Hender as two overeager pre-teen security guards for the party. Nervies and Hender sell their to dedication to the point of overselling, but their attempts to ‘safeguard’ the party from threats that are consistently bigger than them leads to some of the film’s few purely hysterical moments.
Performances aside, Project X is not really a bad movie because it is not really a movie; it is an experience. As the second found footage movie in as many month’s it lacks the narrative ambition of the much smarter and more focused Chronicle, but it comes thisclose to matching the destruction and carnage of Chronicle’s climax, only on a more grounded scale. Occasionally funny, narratively bankrupt, but shockingly, to a fault, audacious, Project X will never be confused as the touchstone of a generation, but it is undoubtedly a disturbingly magnificent, over-the-top encapsulation of the teen party fantasy writ large.
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