Spacetree

I saw Sex Drive at a sneak preview presented by my university. It's a seemingly typical teen sex comedy in the vein of Superbad meets Road Trip. Zuckerman plays Ian, a young virgin with no luck with the ladies, a crush on his childhood friend Felicia (Crew), a jerk of an older brother (Marsden), and is best friends with an Austin Powers-esquire Casanova by the name of Lance (Duke). On the internet, he poses as a football player while courting a mysterious girl online. When the girl invites him to go "all the way", he steals his brother's GTO and heads to Knoxville with Felicia and Lance. Ian's character has the usual nerdy teen virgin-in-a-movie problems: falls for the wrong girls, takes few risks, gets caught in embarrassing sexual situations. On the road trip, they run into a series of hilarious, awkward, and weird situations. And on the way, they discover that sex isn't the most important thing, and that true love can be found in both odd and familiar places.

It's not exactly stunningly original, but it's still a hilarious film. The three leads do a pretty good job, Lance being a particularly funny character. Marsden and Green steal the show in all the scenes they're in, and all of the characters in the film are interesting, even if most of them are stock characters. The script is also well-connected, with most of the characters being connected to the larger plot, and combines wit, ribaldry, and straight adult humor well. Every gag sequence gets big laughs, and the comedy never slows down or dies out. The internet cut-aways are especially hilarious supplements.

It's refreshing to see a genuinely adult comedy not coming from the Apatow crew or McKay and Ferrell. Although it lacks star leads and filmmakers and will probably drop under the radar, I definitely recommend Sex Drive to anyone looking for a big laughs.

I begin this review with a question because this movie is an oddity. I'll get to that in a second. First off, let me say that I have never seen any of the Japanese versions of the films, so I can't compare them and I won't try. That leads me to the second point I would like to make: if you didn't know, this film is actually three separate Japanese films edited into one American version.

That's what makes this film odd. All the faults lie with the editing, dubbing, scripting... basically all the American added elements (surprise surprise, right?). The animation in the film(s) is great: I'm not sure who did the art direction, but it's drastically different from the series' animation, which I always found stiff and repetitive (which, again, might be the result of American editing). The animation in the movies is smooth, dynamic, stylish, and very action packed. It can be compared to the animation in FLCL or the animation in select episodes of Naruto (such as the showdown between Naruto and Sasuke). Everything sort of flows. The character models are a bit more distorted, and it uses darker/cooler color shadings. The overall effect is very good and entertaining.

Unfortunately, the superb action and animation direction is moot when put beside the HORRIBLE dubbing. Saban, like 4Kids is wont to do, chose to drastically alter the original script and writing. Often, side-comments will be added to the dialog for no real reason except, possibly, to cram more dialog into a scene. The jokes are often flat, and distract from the main plot instead of adding to it. If you want a good example of this, watch any of the One Piece episodes translated by 4Kids (i.e. the ones with the crappy rap song opening). It's awful. Thank God Funimation took that show over, but I digress.

Speaking of plot, it's bad. Let me clarify: the plot for the first two sequences (Greymon vs. Parrotmon and the first digidestined vs. Diaboromon/Infermon) is actually good, mainly because it's simple. As stand alone movies, the plot would be fine. However, when combined together with the third sequence/film (featuring the digidestined from season 2 vs. a new digimon named Endigomon), it's bad. Real bad. The connections between each movie are tenuous at best, and terribly explained.

And don't get me started on the third movie. The third movie, in which everything is "explained" and the plot comes together has been edited to hell. There is no continuity, and everything is pretty nonsensical. If you can get any enjoyment from this segment of the film, congratulations. I was just confused, because the scenes have been chopped up and thrown together again. There is no logical flow of action from scene to scene.

So, if I was to make a one word value assessment of this film, it would be "bad". Not terrible. It has some redeeming qualities. I would say it's better than, say, the Yu-Gi-Oh movie.

It's surprising that a movie with so much comedic talent could make me laugh so little. Or maybe it isn't and I'm overestimating Eddie Murphy. In any case, this movie made me laugh about three times: all of them from Eddie Griffin's and Katt Williams's lines. And this was at the END of the movie during the church scene. It took the entire movie to get to the humor. The rest is just badly constructed plot and fat jokes. But the worst part? Rasputia's catch-phrase. Why would she have a catch-phrase? It's like giving Jar Jar Binks a catchphrase; nobody's gonna quote cinema's greatest reject, and nobody's gonna quote this. Don't waste your time with this mess.