This is surprising: “Project X” was co-written by Michael Bacall, the American screenwriter who two years ago gave us “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” That film was smart, funny, witty, creative, appealing and amusing, everything “Project X” is not, much as it tries to be. Perhaps Bacall simply had an off-day, maybe “Scott Pilgrim” was a fluke or maybe his heart just wasn’t in “Project X,” shifting his attention instead to his next project (not called “X”), the soon-to-be-released “21 Jump Street.” Either way, “Project X” is a deeply unpleasant nightmare of a film that should be avoided by anyone fitted with any sense of morality or human decency; if you have either of those, just know that “Project X” is flipping you the bird.
Best described as a party film, “Project X” is notably produced by Todd Phillips, the director who previously brought us parts one and two of comedy smash-hit “The Hangover,” both of which I enjoyed. Both had a “party hard and screw the consequences” attitude to them, a message that is smeared all over the screen of “Project X,” though this time even more gratuitously and even more repugnantly.
The central partiers of “Project X” are high school buddies Thomas (Thomas Mann), Costa (Oliver Cooper) and J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown). Thomas, who is something of an inbetweener, is about to turn seventeen. Coincidentally, his parents are also about to celebrate their anniversary, and decide to go away for the weekend, leaving their suburban California home for their birthday boy to look after. His father sets him some rules: no more than five people are allowed in the house at one time, no one is to go anywhere near his office and, above all, no touching his precious Mercedes. You don’t have to be a genius to uncover the path along which the film’s shenanigans shall inevitably lead us.
With Thomas’ parents gone, Costa and J.B. hatch a plan to throw their pal a big birthday bash in his empty home. They spread the word around school and around the town, hoping for somewhere around fifty people to turn up. They plan for it to be big, but not too big. Next thing they know, word has inexplicably spread like wildfire, and over 1,500 people have invaded Thomas’ house, ready to part-ay like it’s 1999, or indeed 2012.
What follows is an hour-long music video interrupted on occasion by brief narrative interludes shared between our three furiously unlikable leads (Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse they most certainly are not). The music video aspect is interesting, not least because of Nourizadeh’s background in the business, but also because “Project X” is intended to be shot in the found-footage format, a la Josh Trank’s recent superhero drama “Chronicle.” The gimmick here abandons any semblance of believability almost immediately, with faceless and characterless cameraman Dax (Dax Flame) filming things he really ought not to be filming (I’m sure there’s a law against filming in a school changing room).
This is only worsened when the smoothly edited, slickly shot MTV-style montages start to kick in, featuring conveniently utilised slow-motion (to see bitches’ jugs jiggling gently against one another), endless money shots (the car going into the swimming pool, the family dog on a bouncy castle) and, very strangely, underwater filming (to see bitches’ panties and legs all wet 'n’ shit). I don’t mind found-footage gimmickry failing to convince, but “Project X” left me time and again asking myself the same, simple question: “what’s the point?”
The basic premise of the film, and what the marketing has severely strained, is that as the night goes on, the central party escalates further and further into unruly, uncontrollable chaos. And it certainly does: trees are set on fire, dad’s Mercedes is driven into the swimming pool, a drug dealer wields a home-made flamethrower and a testicle-punching dwarf is placed inside an oven. I apologise if I’m making all of this sound like fun; it very much is not, particularly because when squeezed between countless shots of teens drinking and laughing and dancing and puking and snogging and fucking and vandalising and downing drugs, it’s more than a bit monotonous.
“Project X” doesn’t have the brains, the heart or the unrelenting hilarity of its clear superiors, such as Greg Mottola’s “Superbad,” Paul Weitz’s “American Pie," or, dare I mention it, John Landis’ “Animal House.” It has no charm, it has no wit, it has no story and it has no characters. What it does have is a mouth in dire need of a wash, a brain in desperate need of a scan, a disturbingly perverse attitude towards women, a soundtrack of deafeningly loud dance anthems, and a midget trapped inside an oven.
“Project X” is a film that celebrates pointless, mindless anarchy, all presented without the slightest dash of irony or social commentary. Morally disgusting, it is a film that believes a man complaining about his young infant being unable to sleep due to an insanely excessive noise level is a massive asshole. It is a film that treats the female human being as an object of desire to be obtained and nothing more than a public display of tits, ass and pussy. It is a film that believes the most valuable thing in life is being popular, cool, wasted and widely accepted by one’s peers. Worst of all though, it is a film that firmly believes its audience are a bunch of brainless idiots who will simply sit there and accept all this crap - well, “Project X,” I may be an idiot, but I am not just going to sit there and I am not going to accept this crap.
2/10
*standing ovation*
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