Do you remember the episode of “21 Jump Street” where Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum experience four levels of a synthetic street drug called “Holy Fucking Shit”? Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher do. For their first feature, the manic twosome – better known as comedy duo BriTANicK – recently took that piece and rolled it out to a slim but well-crafted feature length, a film in which two college football students are forced to make a perilous journey to their dorm in order to return a pizza that promises neutrality.
Called “Pizza Movie,” it careens between foreskin jokes, exploding headlines, and “Inglourious Basterds” parody in a hurry to make cocaine feel like depression, and it has its irreverent stupidity with the confidence that its young insecure heroes would kill to have. Is it fun? Eh. Is it cheap? A lot. Is there a scene where someone cheats enough to switch bodies with their butterfly? It would be very strange of me to ask that hypocritical question in this context if it didn’t. And while some key elements pay off as well as others (the help of a killer voiceover from a celebrity goes a long way), its absurd absurdity shows that it’s a movie that’s committed to making it. what ever detailing its miners.
Faster than TikTok and with at least better production quality, “Pizza Movie” is a comedy with no purpose or desire other than to prove that an old rock site can still hold the attention of Gen-Z for 92 minutes as long as it feels like it’s fresh out of the oven. Based on the fact that it kept this millennial reviewer entertained for about 65 minutes (give or take), it’s safe to assume that the movie is doing well on its own terms.
“Pizza Movie” doesn’t go out of its way to stand on its own as some kind of temporary collision, but it can be difficult to think of the plot through another lens. McElhaney and Kocher are on my team (I was a little surprised to learn), and they try to stay true to themselves when they get to the freshman court. Meanwhile, former child stars Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone — who still count as teenagers despite being in their 20s — are both trying to make ends meet. above for adult roles that allow them to act a little closer to their age, and do so in a way that will bring their fans along for the ride instead of leaving them behind. And all these people, together with Disney Channel alum Peyton Elizabeth Lee, “How to Reduce the Pipeline” actor Marcus Scribner, and the 31-year-old comedian Caleb Hearon, met in an unstable place in time: an abandoned campus where the production company of American High has become a permanent group for a kind of school comedy.
“Pizza Movie” suggests that they still have a real passion for them. Giambrone, of “Kim Possible” fame, plays Montgomery, a pencil-neck Michael Cera version who “feels like an old man” (his words) and aspires to be a certified alpha when he graduates, even if he’ll have to skip half the Greek alphabet to get there. Montgomery rocks a polo shirt that shows off his bony frame, and flirts with his dream girl Ashley (Lee) by waiting for him in the washroom every week, his pockets stuffed in the seam with extra change in case he needs them. When Ashley points out that Montgomery is always there, she nervously replies “Nobody’s dirtier than me! Then, as she swears at him that he’s not as amazing as he looks, his shorts burst with a spear.”
If that doesn’t give you an idea of ​​how much better this movie is (think “Scott Pilgrim” craziness superimposed on a “Superbad” plot with an “SNL” budget sketch), Jack, Montgomery’s roommate, will be shown tied to a clock tower and popping the group’s balloons because he totally made balloons. Played by Matarazzo, whose curly hair and relatable worldliness help anchor Jonah’s Hill in it all, Jack struggles to enjoy what are supposed to be the best years of his life. All he wants to do is drink the booze he’s smuggled into his bedroom and have a good night out with Montgomery.
That’s when Jack discovers a tin full of generic drugs left in their room by the psycho-chemist who lives there (the amazing Sarah Sherman, featured in a step-by-step YouTube tutorial on surviving the pills she invented). They’re called Mind Igniting Neural Tuning Stimulants, aka “MINTS,” and they basically let McElhaney and Kocher’s script do whatever it wants. The first of six episodes of this drug, for example, involves our heroes being swallowed by a giant squid and forced to entertain an unhappy human baby in its stomach. The next one traps them in a “Groundhog Day”-esque time loop where their heads explode like Gushers every time they swear. Things are getting worse, and will continue to do so until the boys get their hands on the pizza they ordered as an antidote.
Stoner humor has made us accept that Montgomery and Jack – ohhhh like two kinds of cheese, because they are “Pizza Movie, “I just found out that – it may share the same journey, but it soon begins to seem like MINTS is twisting the fabric of reality itself. Trust that this is a feature, not a bug. In fact, McElhaney and Kocher could not be happier to abandon any mental pretense, and their film is even funnier as it elevates the usual places of bipsychods to the usual tropes typical tropics.
Well-worn cliches and story lines, many of which are captured by Lulu Wilson’s Lizzy (a girl who longs to be cool who risks her social status by taking MINTS), give way to second-guess comedy. Some of the gags are inspired, some are outrageous, none of them are presented in a way that shows the filmmakers know the difference,’ all of them are thrown down your throat until they are reduced enough to swallow them. In fact, the “Pizza Movie” is so fast that individual slices can alternate between dim and bright in a matter of seconds; the sequence of “cursing words” comes to mind, when stupid new information about drugs suddenly redeems a little that seemed to be working. That dynamic also shifts at times, like Hearon’s role – of the fun rookie RA who doesn’t get along with the other cops in the film’s Nazi-coded dorm – is as funny as a fish out of water before it’s strained for laughs by dressing him like the Grinch in a diaper.
But even when “The Pizza Movie” feels out of place, which it often is, there’s something strange about how it tries to be nakedly funny. While McElhaney and Kocher don’t live up to their expectations enough for me to consider warming up their film for another watch, they don’t take the easy way out either; even the worst comedy here has a real love of the game, and is united by the centrifugal force of two people who are doing everything in their power to revive the types of films that were an important part of the promise of America before we surrendered the majority of the comedy universe to social media. How fitting that the film’s biggest laughs come from when the makers break the fourth wall and show us exactly how hard they tried to achieve that goal.
Group: C
“Pizza Movie” will be available to stream on Hulu beginning Friday, April 3.
Want to stay up-to-date on IndieWire film? feelings and negative thoughts? Register here in our newly launched newsletter, David Ehrlich’s Review, in which the Chief Film Critic and Chief Reviews Editor collects the best reviews, streaming picks, and offers some new hits, available only to subscribers.
#Pizza #Movie #Review #Origins #BriTANicK #Surreal #College #Drug #Comedy #TikTok #Generation