Project X Review

Remember Chronicle? That very surprising film about young kick ass super heros who document the effects of what their powers could do? Remember how great that film was? Remember how it literally almost saved the style of Cinéma vérité(which film has been missing these past few years)? Well I do. After seeing Project X, I can assure you, that hack of a movie almost ruined everything Chronicle has done to save a dying format.

The plot for the movie is basically simple. Costa(Oliver Cooper) and J.B.(Jonathan Daniel Brown) set a secret party for their fellow Best friend Thomas(Thomas Mann), who is aware of the party. All of this is being filmed by Dax(Dax Flame), who lives alone and doesn't drink. The trio are only having this party as a way to enter the social center of High School. What starts out as a relatively small party becomes a successful party for the trio, which later on ends up being a ground zero fight between S.W.A.T. , drunken teenagers, and a pissed off drug dealer. Will they survive the greatest night of their young lives?

I'm just going to go ahead and say that I hated everyone in this movie. Costa is not only an offensive character, but he is the most despicable character in film since Jar Jar Binks in Phantom Menace. J.B. is literally the bastard child of Jonah Hill, he has no charisma, and your glad he broke his thumb. Thomas, who is supposed to be the films hero, is hard to even care about. He not only is supposed to carry the film, but we're trying to care for every action and consequence he is put through, and he fails at trying to get the audience to do that. Dax actually becomes the only character you actually give a damn about. Since he's the guy who is holding the camera, you're actually wondering what he is thinking about during all the chaos. He is only given a maximum of about 6 or 7 lines and he should have been the main archetype of the film. No girl in this movie is actually interesting. They are either presented as meat, or..... yeah, just meat.

This is marketed as a Todd Phillips(Old School, The Hangover) film. It's not, he's just producing it so that audiences can say "yeah! This is gonna be like The Hangover!". While I'm pretty sure a lot of young adolescents were having hangovers in jail after that enormous party, it really should not have any comparisons to Phillips other films. This is a film that is written by Matt Drake and Michael Bacall(Scott Pilgrim), and I am disappointed. Bacall, who we know can write a great comedic film because of Scott Pilgrim, writes a fairly lazy, uninteresting, and cliched story. Nima Nourizadeh is the films first time director, and he is bad. There is just so much of this movie that he could have changed for the better instead of just making this movie for horny adolescents. All in all, give credit to editor Jeff Groth who I'm pretty sure had spent hours just to try and make a coherent story out this this insult to my generation.

Speaking of my generation, what the hell? Is this really how we're viewed? If The Social Network taught us anything, it was that my generation is darker and smarter than most people presume we are. But Project X somehow manages to make complete horny idiots out of my generation. I can't say that I have attended this sort of party in my life span, which I'm glad I haven't. But if I were to compare this out of something I have witnessed, it would be Prom. Prom night was supposed to be the social event where we were to take a break from all the hard work we accomplished. But from what I saw, it was just a night of dry humping and bad music. And while I enjoyed my Prom night, I was sort of disturbed by what my generation could do. And that same thought is what went through my head during this film, but without any pleasure.

If you ask most people, they will tell you that they are tired of the "Found Footage" genre, or as I prefer to call it Cinéma vérite. They history of Cinéma vérite was that it was used to document events of real life, one of the more famous examples would be "An American Family" which followed The Loud Family for 12 episodes. It was a breakthrough in Film and Television. More recent examples, like Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, and The Blair Witch Project, have shown that audiences really do like the ambiguous style, but to an extent. These days, because of our phones and the computers, we can see all of this on the internet, some more raw than others. This film tries to be what all the other examples have set out to be, but fails because it is too busy exploiting teens.

Overall, this is a very insulting movie to the new generation, and is devoid of anything actually worthy of comedy.

I give it 1.5/5 Stars