Funny Sex Drive Passes the Test
High School Senior Ian (Josh Zuckerman) is unlucky in love, so much so he turns to the Internet to find romance. When his pigheaded older brother Rex (James Marsden) heads out with the rest of the family on a trip, the kid “borrows” his brothers prized vintage GTO and heads on a cross-country weekend trip with best friends Felicia (Amanda Crew) and Lance (Clark Duke) to hopefully meet this object of his desire.
Seth Green and Clark Duke in Summit Entertainment's Sex Drive
The new teenage gross-out comedy Sex Drive is not my typical kind of movie. In all honesty, I tend to shy away from these pictures, most of them (like American Pie or Porky’s) not doing a darn thing for me. I tend to find them sophomoric and dumb, a lot of the sex-fueled and potty mouth humor lost on me no matter how hard I try to feel otherwise.
There are exceptions, of course. I adore The Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with the best of them, while Risky Business isn’t just the best of the lot but maybe one of my favorite motion pictures of all-time. Heading into the now I really liked Superbad and I have a slight fondness for The Girl Next Door, and even though I should probably not make this admission for some reason 10 Things I Hate About You has grown on me over the years to the point I actually look forward to repeat viewings.
This one, while nowhere near the same category of greatness of the first five, is actually a heck of lot better than that awfully enjoyable latter pair. The bottom line is that I laughed, sometimes a lot, and while I freely admit the script is a bunch of teenage sex comedy hokum the fact I couldn’t stop smiling says volumes for just how overall entertaining it actually is.
Director and co-writer Sean Anders keeps things moving at a convincingly breakneck pace, while his trio of young unknowns do a grand job of crafting believable three-dimensional adolescents I couldn’t help but feel affinity for. The jokes he and fellow writer John Morris come up with are actually kind of inspired, entire tangential bits so exhilaratingly uproarious I had to wipe the giggle-enduced tears away from eyes.
But the real reasons this movie works as well as it does is thanks to pros Marsden and Seth Green, the two of them stealing the entire picture right out from underneath their newbie costars. What they do borders on magical, each of them bringing entirely different talents (one shows an almost fearless ability to poke fun of himself, while the other is so sardonically nonplussed he almost doesn’t even have to open his mouth to get me to laugh) to the table I admittedly didn’t know what either of them was going to do next.
This isn’t the kind of movie that wins awards. It’s not even the type that I’ll probably remember much longer then it takes to get to the end of the year. Yet, this film made me laugh and I had a great time watching it, and for right now thanks to those reasons (as well as the near-brilliance of both Marsden and Green) I’m more than happy to give Sex Drive the green light.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
Additional Links
- Sex Drive Theatrical Trailer
