Cert – Recommended ages 18+, Run-time – 1 hour 38 minutes, Directors – Nick Kocher, Brian McElhaney
With just hours to finalise their decision for housing next year, college losers Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) take a powerful drug and go on adventure through the dorm corridors to collect their pizza order.
There’s always the fear with a new high school or college stoner flick that it’s going to try and be the next big thing for the current generation by referring to much to that for the last one. Pizza Movie opens with worries that it’s just trying to be Superbad, failing to understand that what makes films like that, and Animal House many years before it, work is that they’re so much a part of the time in which they were made. Yet, what becomes evident is that there may not be the next big teen stoner comedy here, but an amusingly silly drug-based venture.
Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone) are the losers of their year group at college. Tormented by the jocks, unable to talk to the girls they like – for Montgomery this is Peyton Elizabeth Lee’s Ashley – if they’re not being chased down and beaten they’re trying to work out what they’re going to do in terms of housing next year. The clock is ticking and with hours left to go they order a pizza, take a drug that promises to make them feel like they’re floating on clouds and must face an adventure through the dorm corridors to get to the delivery robot that can’t get up the stairs.
The drug itself is treated like a video game, with different levels of intensity and a new gimmick each time; some lasting with more confidence in the gag than others. There’s fun to be had with the silliness on display in some of these ideas, even a joke such as the pair having to restart their journey as their heads ‘explode’ every time they swear manages to squeeze a good few laughs out of something that could quickly become thin. It helps that writer-directors Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney have kept things relatively simply in terms of what they do with their narrative.
There’s a subplot for the delivery bot, which provides a good handful of chuckles in its determination to deliver, and run-ins with jocks and a plot relating more to controlling student housing the next year – which feels slightly left behind until the third act where it comes across as more of a way to start to wrap things up instead of the pizza being more of the basis. Throughout all of this it feels like the creatives are simply having fun with their ideas, and that comes across and adds to some of the humour and silliness. Yes, not everything lands and sometimes you can feel a gag really falling flat, or trying a bit too hard to get the new Superbad-style audience, but for the most part there’s a perfectly amusing time to be had.
Things are kept moving with enough pace and focus on humour that there are enough gags which do work to see things through, and something of a surprise after a tedious set of opening events. Flashbacks, visions, truth-effects and an intensely committed robot all make for plenty of amusement in the successful silliness of a film that for the most part remembers that it’s a journey for pizza.
While some moments stray away from the simple pizza collection journey, and not every gag lands, there are a good handful of laughs in the stoner silliness of Pizza Movie to see it through its mostly simple narrative.
Just A Little Bit Random 