Project X, a movie about a teen party gone horribly wrong, would be every parent's worst nightmare if it weren't so inane.
It's billed as a comedy, but there's not a laugh to be had during the frenetic mayhem. There is also no plot beyond debauchery, nor characters beyond cardboard cutouts. Basically, it's a setting, and a familiar one: a suburban home teeming with drunken, druggie, hedonistic, irresponsible high-schoolers.
Herein lies a heinous, misogynistic movie filled with faceless crowds and nary a character who resembles an actual human being. Then there's a ridiculously corny romantic ending, la John Hughes movies, tacked on as if to atone for all that went before.
As a spoof, it fails miserably. Its one-note concept is carried out in the most derivative fashion, employing the overused "found footage" technique (Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity movies), in which someone has a camera rolling within the film, documenting every casual conversation, as well as every catastrophe, as it occurs. Here, it simply provides an excuse for muddy-looking camera work.
A shy guy named Thomas (Thomas Mann) is having his 17th birthday, and his supremely annoying pal Costa (Oliver Cooper) decides to stage a party that will vault their status from dweebs to cool guys who can score with the hottest babes.
Costa sends an email blast and posts the party on Craigslist. That's perhaps the only vaguely fresh element: invitations gone viral. The party draws a couple of thousand boors and bimbos, and nearly every imaginable horror occurs, including a Mercedes sunk into a swimming pool and a neighborhood set on fire. Almost every terrible outcome is predictable.
As supposed evidence of originality, a dwarf is stuffed into the oven and the family dog is set aloft with helium balloons. Amid the carousing are the requisite jokes about coitus interruptus and defecation.
Perhaps a better title would have been There Will Be Vomit.
