A Poor March is a Major Miss
The new comedy Miss March has two great laughs. The first comes early, right before the nebbish hero Eugene (Zach Cregger) is about to have sex for the first time with his girlfriend Cindi (Raquel Alessi) after their High School Prom. The second comes before the third act stretch on a wannabe rap mogul’s (Craig Robinson) tour bus and involves sex-obsessed idiot Tucker (Trevor Moore) about to get it on with a scantily clad groupie.
Molly Stanton, Trevor Moore and Zach Cregger in Fox Searchlight's Miss March
And that’s really it. There were a couple of other gags I snickered at, and popular Playboy playmate Sara Jean Underwood actually has some perkily enchanting screen presence, but overall this barely 90-minute debut of the minds behind the popular “The Whitest Kids U’ Know” is fairly horrible. Like a lot of artists making the jump from sketch comedy to features, Cregger and Moore’s opus feels like a series of extended skits in search of a connective reason to exist. The whole thing left me bored, and if I’d have remembered to wear a watch I’m sure I’d have looked at it a half dozen times waiting for the torture to end.
The plot is as simple and as sophomoric as they come. Right before he’s supposed to have sex with his equally virginal girlfriend Cindi (the duo host abstinence seminars for Middle School students together), Eugene has an accident and ends up in a coma. Flash-forward four years he wakes up to discover the love of his life is now a Playboy Playmate. He decides to head cross-country with Tucker to see what happened, maybe even rekindle the magic that once made them an item.
It sounds high concept but it really isn’t, the movie relying on a series of poop and penis comedy so lowbrow Judd Apatow wouldn’t even use it in one of his lesser (usually starring Will Ferrell) efforts. Okay, I liked the bit with the car driving down the road covered in fire axes (it’s better if I don’t explain), and Cregger is actually kind of a winning guy (even if the movie he’s helped craft doesn’t do him any favors), but this is the type of enterprise I tend to loathe, the finished product not doing a darn thing to change that fact.
These guys apparently have quite a following, “The Whitest Kids U’ Know” a college campus sensation. But that’s probably how it is going to remain after this movie. Cregger and Moore aren’t very good directors and, as writers, they tend to revel in tired sex comedy predictability. This movie was just plain bad and, a few moments of light laughter aside, Miss March is a major miss-take I don’t want to think about ever again.
Film Rating: ê (out of 4)
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