EW Movie Review: Project X

By:Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Its now official: 2012 is the year in which the Blair Witch-style, shaky-cam thing busted out of its horror-movie roots and proved it can be applied to almost any genre. Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment Weekly magazine, has a closer look at Project X.

To view our videos, you need to enable JavaScript. Learn how. install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now. Then come back here and refresh the page.

A few weeks ago, Chronicle used the style to create ingenious low-budget sci-fi, and now theres Project X, a teenage house-party bacchanal produced by Todd Phillips. It feeds I Love the 80s clichs through a kind of bobbing-camera Mixmaster. Its Cant Hardly Wait for the age of Jersey Shore.

In suburban Pasadena, three exceedingly ordinary high school dudes stage an all-the-way birthday bash for one of them, even though theyre not exactly the kind of guys youd expect to attract a hot crowd. Thomas, played by Thomas Mann, is the one turning 17. Hes the dutiful son who has promised not to mess up his parents house. The other two are Oliver Cooper, in the David Krumholtz-Curtis Armstrong role of the derisive noodge who speaks in hip-hop putdowns, and Jonathan Daniel Brown as the harmless mascot along for the ride.

You could call these three a junior Hangover trio, and youd be right, except that the real giveaway to the kind of movie Project X is arrives when Thomass father warns him not to lay a finger on Dads cherished Mercedes. Its a trope out of the era of License to Drive, and so is everything else in this movie. But the going-all-the-way clichs have now been wrapped up in a kind of lively documentary of excess.

Project X was directed by Nima Nourizadeh, who does a logistically impressive job of making the action look like one continuous, surging spurt of youthful hormonal alcoholic insanity. The films guiding spirit, though, is Todd Phillips, who maintains his singular genius for updating the clichs of the Animal House era so that they look just dangerous enough to make nostalgia feel naughty.

Project X serves up the frat house/Spring Break antics weve all been watching for years, and implies that its smashing down cathartic new barriers of misbehavior. In the end, though, it aint nothin but a party.

Read more:
EW Movie Review: Project X