What
does that have to do with Project X?
Basically everything, as you'll soon see.
As
a bit of background, I had heard about Project X
being like the found-footage version of American Pie,
but it didn't really interest me. But then, much like with Noobz, I read an article about how the movie was really, really terrible on
multiple levels. Maybe
I'm a bit of a cinematic masochist, but I find this sort of
indictment irresistible. Nevertheless, even I wasn't prepared for
exactly what it was that I was signing up for.
I'm
not even going to mince words or build up any sort of uncertainty
about what I thought about this movie, but rather I'm just going to
state it upfront and outright: I absolutely loathed it.
I was taking notes as I was watching it, and these notes read like a
descent into madness – my first note was literally “less than 1
minute in, when the guy does a crotch grab and then starts yelling
'HEY, I WANT SOME PUSSSSSSAY!!' I know I am going to hate this”. By
the end, my notes have lost coherence, becoming little more than
garbled swear words decrying the movie, its characters and the
filmmakers. The only consolation is that I get to write this review
to try to capture why I hated it so much... I hope you enjoy this,
because I know that I am going to.
First
of all, it should be noted that Project X
is a part of the found-footage genre. Now despite what you might
think, I actually am not a found-footage snob like some reviewers. In
fact I have quite enjoyed the majority of the films I have seen in the
genre, such as The Blair Witch Project
(which was quite frightening), Cloverfield,
REC and Chronicle
(which, in my humble opinion, really represented an evolution of both
the superhero and found-footage genres). In fact, the only
found-footage movie I didn't really like was Diary of the
Dead, but not due to the
filming style, but rather because of the weak story and characters. All
of these films took a central gimmick (the hand-held camera) and kept
it consistent, using it in interesting ways (especially Chronicle).
However, I felt that Project X
used its central gimmick incredibly ineffectually. For one thing, it
feels like it is really nothing more than a gimmick, used because
it's popular right now (a la, Paranormal Activity)
and costs less to make. While this is a more minor issue, the use of
the camera doesn't really have consistency – the perspective is
largely based around a single camera, but without warning it jumps to
someone else's camera a few times during the movie. In Chronicle
this made more sense because the singular
camera wasn't what was important, but rather surveillance in general,
but it feels like little more than convenience in this film. Finally,
and most importantly, the camera is used in an extremely unnatural
way. I'm not talking the Cloverfield-style
“put down the camera and run!” sort of unnatural – I can live
with that. What I mean is that the cameraman will document stuff
which makes absolutely no sense for him to capture as a guy who is
filming for a party.
The movie forces in “quiet moments” where two characters talk
privately to one another (you can tell they're emotional because no
one is talking about banging bitchez) or parts where the camera is
watching from far away and yet still perfectly captures the dialogue
going on. Even little things like changing angles during a
conversation are forced in and just break the illusion of
consistency. Then there's other issues – why do they have a
cameraman documenting a party which hasn't even been planned at the
start? Why did they get a cameraman who they don't even know?
Why are they documenting using an expensive camera when they're just
a bunch of teenagers? Honestly, it doesn't make any sense and really
breaks the illusion.
Moving on to the characters, who happen
to be some of the most obnoxious douchebags I've ever seen in a
movie. The most grievous offender is Costa, a loathsome little shit
whose only priority and care in life is getting laid. I think he was
meant to be endearing in his selfishness, like Stifler in American
Pie, but he just comes across as
a massive asshole. Maybe that's because Sean William Scott is a much
better character actor than Oliver Cooper, or because Stifler always
got his comeuppance, or maybe even because he had redeeming traits.
Whatever the case, this does not apply to Costa. He is gleefully
irresponsible, self-centred, sexist and homophobic, even playing
pranks to get babies to cry for a laugh.
Holy shit, no I did not watch the North Korean propaganda version of
Project X by mistake,
the guy I just described is one of the freaking heroes of
the movie.
The
other characters aren't even worth going into detail on because they
can be summed up in a sentence or two. The supposed protagonist,
Thomas Kub, is basically just a geeky teenager caught up in a party
that he can't control. His friend, J.B. is a fat loser, and that's
literally all you need to know about him. Kirby is the generic love
interest who Thomas (and his friends for that matter) somehow doesn't
notice is not only really hot, but also has a crush on him for
whatever reason. Finally there's Alexis, the popular girl at school
who, again, wants to bang Thomas for some inexplicable reason. Alexis
Knapp (the actors in the film share their characters' names for the
most part) claims that she wanted her character to be more than the typical “hot chick” archetype, but that didn't come out in the
movie at all.
Okay, so by my tally that leaves us with a cast of flat characters and then one massive asshole to round it out. Well that's fine and dandy, but terrible characters alone don't sink a movie – after all, I quite liked Final Destination 5, and the majority of the cast there were pricks. So what did I think of the movie itself then? Well let me put it simply: less than 15 minutes in, I wanted to turn it off. The characters were so obnoxious that it was painful to watch. Not only that but there's also a lot of empty space filled with pointless stuff, such as the couple minutes in the film where the main characters corner Costa in a bathroom stall and dump garbage on him... never before has mean-spirited pranking been more boring. Or how about the part where Costa makes pelvic thrusting motions at a lawn gnome for 10 seconds before deciding to steal it in little more than an obvious plot contrivance (since it turns out that the gnome was filled with ecstasy). Then there's the pointless stuff which was just plain gross – I thought it was screwed up enough that they decided to film a girl taking a piss on the driveway (which she didn't seem to have a single problem with), but then they also show another guy getting gang pissed on. BLOODY HELL. Ha ha, teenage antics and all that, right?
Anyway, the party gets ridiculously out of hand, and the neighbours come to try to break it up because it's 11:30pm and the guy can't get his freaking baby to go to sleep because of all the damn teenagers being morons. Sounds like a pretty reasonable request to me, but then again I'm not an abhorrent dick like Costa. He basically tells the guy to screw off and then his security team freaking tasers the guy out of nowhere. WHAT THE HELL. This guy is then treated like he's a massive dick, when he's acting totally reasonably.
You might notice that I haven't really focused that much on the actual party that the movie revolves around. Well, what can I say? It's a video of a party. There's lots of time spent watching people drinking, doing drugs, running around naked and just acting generally irresponsible. It's like watching a video of fireworks – sure, it might have been cool to watch for real, but do you really care about it when it's just a video? For that matter though, how the hell did no one die at this party? J.B. does a freaking roof jump and breaks his pinky finger like it's no big deal (he's literally laughing about it), and a guy with a freaking FLAMETHROWER shows up and starts torching everything. But beyond the ridiculous things which happened in the movie, there were a ton of ways in which one of these idiots could have killed themselves, from overdoses to the parts where people are blowing up f--king beer bottles on the stove all over each other.
As
for other issues with this movie, there are many. I
could mention that the only reason that the movie features a midget
(or, uh, I think little person might be the proper term now?) is so
they can throw him in the oven for a cheap laugh. I could focus on
homophobia, but I think that it's really a minor issue in regards to
this particular movie. No, the real focus should be on the ridiculous
amount of sexism. With the exception of Thomas' mother and a store
clerk, literally every woman in this movie boils down to two things:
- Tits, and
- Ass
Remember
when I was talking about Kirby being the love interest earlier?
Normally in a teen comedy of this ilk, such as American
Pie, the love interest will
generally be fleshed out as something more than the T&A which
most of the girls are shown as in the movie, if only by a little bit
(in the case of American Pie,
think Heather in comparison to Natalia). Kirby barely falls into this
category – she's completely undeveloped and really only serves as
T&A half of the time anyway (quite, uh, literally at one
particular moment where she steps out of the pool). Of course, she
walks in on Thomas with Alexis, but she gets over it at the end
because apparently if a guy's sorry and you throw an epic party then
you can get away with anything. Kirby's hardly the exception though,
since every other girl in the movie is ridiculously good looking and
overtly sexualized. As far as we're concerned, they all came to the
party to have sex, full-stop. Even the freaking news anchor at the
end of the movie is nothing more than a pair of boobs.
By
the end of the movie, the characters have caused hundreds of
thousands, possibly even millions of
dollars worth of damage, but there's hardly any acknowledgement of
the consequences of their actions. Thomas' dad barely even seems to
care that his son burned down his house and destroyed his car (in
fact he's almost impressed).
The epilogue claims that Thomas is the only one who actually suffered
any sort of retribution for his actions (although it's softened in
that he gets Kirby), whereas Costa and J.B. get off completely
scott-free. If you actually threw a party like that, you can be sure
you'll be getting a criminal record and probably arrested as well,
which doesn't exactly look great on a resume (not to mention the lack
of a degree due to all the fines you had to pay). Possibly worst of
all, Thomas is turned into something of a martyr – he was just
trying to have a bit of fun with 1500 other people! Why should he get
in trouble for that? Putting aside the obvious, this is an extremely
irresponsible line of thought, and has already had its consequences –
in the wake of the movie's release, lots of total dumbasses decided
to throw their own Project X Parties. The
consequences of this should be pretty freaking obvious: millions of
dollars of damage has already been caused and at least one person has
died.
I will reiterate what I said at the start of this review: teenagers
are morons.
Especially when they get together.
To
put a point on things, Project
X
was horrendous. To people who defend this movie by saying that it's
just fun, that it's not going for any Oscars or anything, I must say
this: Terminator
2 is
also fun. The difference is though, that Terminator
2 is
an awesome movie, whereas Project
X is
a massive pile of shit. Why watch Project
X when
you could watch Terminator
2?
If you think that's an unfair comparison, then try this: Shoot
'Em Up is
a stupid movie, but it's incredibly fun to watch. Project
X
was abysmal. Rather than try to explain just how bad it was, here's a link to Thesaurus' entry for “horrible”. There's
only one other movie I've seen that I hated more than Project
X (and I'm going to withhold it
for now because I want to write a retrospective on it sometime in the
future).
And worst of all?
They're making a sequel.
No words can express how I feel quite so adequately...
0/10
(If
you think my score is pretty harsh, then I'll consider this – even
if I didn't ding the movie an irredeemable piece of shit because of its ethics and treatment of minorities, I'd
still harp on it for its awful characters, poor filmmaking and
generic story. I think the very best I could muster if I was feeling
generous would be a 2/10. So, either way you slice it, it's still a
cake made of shit.)
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