Pizza Movie review
After experimenting with a mind-bending drug that randomly appears in their dorm, two roommates order pizza; the only problem is that they must go all the way downstairs to pick it up. The two roommates, one reckless, the other one shy, must go on a wacky adventure full of hallucinations, revelations, and crazy encounters.
Premiering for the first time at South by Southwest (SXSW) on March 13th, Pizza Movie will have its full release on April 3rd on Hulu. Pizza Movie is the directorial debut of the comedy writing duo Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, whose previous work for Saturday Night Live and Breaking News landed them this job. The cast includes Gaten Matarazzo, Sean Giambrone, Lulu Wilson, Jack Martin, Daniel Radcliffe, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Caleb Hearon, Sarah Sherman, Marcus Scribner, Justin Cooley, Kevin Matthew Reyes, and Adam Herschman. Being their directorial debut, Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher obtained a stellar cast full of young comedic actors and some older ones who play some surprise characters.
This movie really wants to be the new Superbad (2008), and it’s painfully obvious. For the most part, the jokes aren’t funny, the plot makes no sense, the characters are extremely unrealistic, yet somehow, everything is so predictable. Maybe if I weren’t a literal college student, I’d find this funny, but the dialogue is so cringeworthy, and the jokes are just dumb. It is clear that the two directors haven’t been in college for years, and they don’t really understand how people in college talk and interact. However, this could’ve all been excused if the film was funny, a lot of college movies are outlandish and are a caricature of what a college experience is, but in those cases, the movies are hilarious and don’t try to be realistic. The funniest parts of the whole film are the very minimal screen time that Caleb Hearon, he’s hilarious and brings his own comedic style to this film that seems out of place solely because everything else is so unfunny.
This could have easily been a really cool, funny, and trippy college movie about two guys taking psychedelics and getting pizza, but instead, you're left with bland characters who have already been done before but better, maybe three jokes that are worth a laugh, and no cool visuals. If you’ve seen any successful college or high school comedy since the 80s, these characters are just a worse rehashing of them; there’s nothing new except for the situation they’re put in. Gaten and Sean try their best with the characters, and they’re both good actors, but it’s hard to care about characters that have already existed but are better. Furthermore, considering the movie’s marketing is all about psychedelic imagery, there were only a handful of really cool shots. Instead, all of the “trippy” scenes consist of boring imagery with cool set pieces, ugly CGI characters, or weird nonsense that looks like someone saw a YouTube compilation of David Lynch scenes and decided they could make it funny (they couldn’t). Overall, I wouldn’t really recommend this movie to anyone. Maybe if someone wants something to put on in the background and they can’t find anything better, I’d tell them to put this on.
