Sex Drive (2008) More at IMDb Pro »

Since this film was a comedy let's look at it in that light first. I saw this movie about a week ago and it had about two hilarious moments which I am having a hard time remembering. The rest of the film most of the audience sat there in silence, with sporadic giggles throughout. My friends whom I watched the pre-screening with said they were amused in general but didn't find the film very funny. This is probably because this film strongly uses clichés and old ideas that have just been reshuffled with relatively little originality.

The originality is this: The two main characters (the lead and his goofy friend) are in some sort of role reversal where their bodies and personalities are flipped and it's very hard to believe either can be themselves the way they are. The whole film I felt this way and and it was quite distracting, this may to some degree be attributed to the actors and Director failing to create believability and instead creating teen-comedy caricatures, but to the actors credit the three leads showed promise and could do better in a different movie.

The comedy itself has a lot of preteen raunchiness that appears so often and so strongly that if you were to see a naked old man showing his gonads like in the movie "Borat" you wouldn't be very shocked or surprised. Normally this would be funny, like in the scene in "American Pie" with the the pie; but since this film holds very little meaning below the obvious surface gags, the comedy punch doesn't land strongly if at all that often.

This film was also full of young beautiful actresses meant to portray the regular public as they cameo over and over again through most scenes. I don't recall one average looking young woman in the whole movie. This was slightly annoying because perhaps I was looking for something like "Dazed and Confused" and felt like was I was watching something a little better than "American Pie 3". What I mean is that this film is like "Superbad" where it's laden with raunchy teen comedy and some teen sexual angst. But unlike "Superbad" it doesn't have the deep underlying truths that elevate the script above boorish crude gags. If it weren't for those two hilarious scenes I failed to describe and perhaps the saving grace of the lead actors this film would be garbage. But it's not, and kudos to the Donut costume! If you are between the ages of 13-19 you'll probably like this film a bunch. Everybody else prepare to be mostly silently amused.

6/10