The premise of Project
X is that a lanky dweeb (Thomas Mann) is turning 17 so his friends decide
to throw him the birthday party to end all birthday parties. That’s it. The
movie takes place over the day and night of the party. The plan starts from a
place of simple envy and fantasizing. Towards the beginning of the movie the
dweeb and his grating best friend (Oliver Cooper) and pudgy third wheel
(Jonathan Daniel Brown) overhear some dude in the locker room boasting about
the wild party he went to over the weekend, the kind of half-believable high
school rumor party that was so totally wild you can’t believe you’ve barely
heard of it. Never mind the fact that the clearly exaggerated party – one in
which even that kid in a wheelchair got some raunchy behavior done to him – is
only an unattainable ideal for these kids. It makes them jealous enough to
double down on their commitment to coolness through partying.
The kids are all alone in the house since the dweeb’s
parents have left for the weekend, scurrying out the door shortly after singing
“Happy Birthday” and watching their son blow out his candles. So the party
planning committee jumps into action, anticipating “no more than 50 people” to
carouse in the pool and to drink beer the graduated-but-hardly-gone jock (Miles
Teller) promised to bring. As is so often the case in teen comedies, the party
grows comically overstuffed – at one point the attendance is estimated to be
1,500 to 2,000 people – and every bit of the house set up as untouchable, every
bit of the rules meant to be unbroken, are touched, broken, or otherwise
defiled in unspeakable ways.
At first, the movie seems to be headed for a nice, resonant
point amidst the nonstop debauchery. It’s shot in a found-footage style, which
allows first-time director Nima Nourizadeh to show what the kids themselves find
most important, their instant self-mythologizing in a way. (It’s also a
technique that’s been used almost exclusively for horror on the big screen,
which gives the whole thing razor’s-edge uncomfortableness). At one point the
birthday boy frets that footage will end up on YouTube and his parents will
find out. I was all ready to praise the film for using an overdone style in an
intermittently successful genre to make a larger societal point. With a
proliferation of video cameras and easy access to the Internet, kids these days
can find their mistakes permanently part of an easily searchable archive of
amateur footage. So a teenager throws a party behind his parent’s back? I’m sure
it happens and sometimes he’d get caught and punished. The self-chronicling of
teenagers means that any guest is a potential security breach. There’s almost
no way news of this party won’t get out.
But Matt Drake and Michael Bacall’s script doesn’t go there.
The party just grows wilder and wilder by the montage. Soon, it’s not just
teens dancing and drinking, soliciting a perfectly reasonable noise complaint
from a neighbor that is laughed off in a particularly cruel scene. They’re
locking a midget in an unused oven. They’re taking pills and jumping off the
roof and hanging from the chandelier. They’re fighting and making out. They’re
setting up Rube Goldberg illegal substance consumption devices. Someone even
drives a car into the pool. And all that’s before the cops show up in riot gear
and some dude arrives with his flamethrower, fully intending to use it. The
excessive partying becomes essentially a riot. Now of course the parents will
find out, diffusing the potential impact of its broader sociological
implications.
After a while, I found myself just tired of it all. It sets
up the partiers as purposefully thin characters and I just couldn’t spend any
more time in their company. They’re totally wild in a thoroughly unenjoyable
way. How many people can you watch puking, peeing, or punching before you’ve
had enough? By the end, the movie just shakes its head and grins. Man, wasn’t
that a night? It plays off with a laugh police, neighbors, and parents. But
these aren’t just people who are a little too uptight, the usual source of
scorn in these kinds of movies. These are people who don’t want their
neighborhood burnt to the ground. I think they’re entitled to their objections.
There are some nice touches here and there. I liked how the
friends hire a couple of gravely serious twelve-year-olds to run security for
the party. I enjoyed the thumping hip-hop hits on the soundtrack. I liked the
random mustachioed gentleman who shows up to party, later pukes all over a parked
car, and then turns up the next morning standing next to his exasperated and
unsuspecting wife as she’s interviewed by the local news.
This is, all things considered, essentially a brisk and
well-made cheapie exploitation picture. It reminded me of Alexandre Aja’s similarly
exasperating Piranha in its
willingness to set up a group of self-destructive slimeballs and then sit back
and watch the carnage. But as the craziness of the party spirals out of control
I found myself feeling nothing but sadness for the central character, the poor,
sweet-faced little guy, as his eyes grow redder and his complexion pales and
the doom of it all settles on his shoulders. No one deserves this. If the movie
had cared, even a little bit, about the characters, it would have done a better
job putting all the little transgressive moments into a larger, more
satisfying, emotional context.
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