Any movie that draws comparisons with last year’s hideous party train wreck that was Project X isn’t off to a good start. Indeed 21 & Over, the latest film from the writers of The Hangover, is like Project X with some sort of a plot, albeit in the form of a thinly veiled excuse for increasingly wild and crude antics. But that’s the key to why this is at least watchable fare if not exactly the hilarious college romp the creators so desperately want it to be; it at least has a few brain cells alive up top.
The plot, is thin as it is, centres on a couple of old high school friends, Miller (Miles Teller) and Casey (Skylar Astin), who decide to help their friend Jeff Chang (Justin Chon) celebrate his 21st birthday in style. The trouble is Jeff has a big job interview the next morning on the request of his controlling father. So what starts out as a few beers with friends turns into a night of mayhem and debauchery.
It’s very much apparent that this is directed and written by the same writers of The Hangover, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, as it attempts to replicate the bromance of that staggeringly successful franchise. That aspect sort of works because it at least has likeable leads in Teller and Astin, a double-act mix of immature and slightly less immature. The funniest moments of the film come not from the wild antics caused by alcohol consumption and increasingly unbelievable messes they find themselves in but rather in the small in-between moments of banter. Conversations about Joseph Gordon Levitt’s career turnaround from 3rd Rock From the Sun to big movie star, for example, are highlights.
Of course when it comes down to it’s a movie about extremity and debauchery but missing the ironic target so astutely hit by Harmony Korine and his Spring Breakers recently. It does try to sneak in a thematic thread about being your own person and not just doing what others tell you but it doesn’t really pull it off when just an hour before we were watching someone be sick in slow motion on a mechanical bull.
Problematic humour involving casual racism and sexism can be found throughout 21 & Over, a film that doesn’t aim very high and only just about achieves it. It covers bases already done so by Will Ferrell and Co. in Old School a decade ago – running drunk and (almost) naked down the street for example – but this one at least has sympathy for its characters. It functions as a sort of Diet Hangover and has its funny moments that’s only just enough to sustain through an escalating set of brash, immature set pieces.
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21 & Over is released in UK cinemas on May 3rd.