The there are plenty of indications along the way that Road Trip: Beer Pong might, in fact, be much smarter than it has to be, best summed up when Jenna (Julia Levy-Boken), the French-born young woman whose work as the face (and uh, other body parts) of the beer pong championships has inspired her long-lost love (and beer pong genius) Andy (Preston Jones) to drive from Ithaca, N.Y. to Atlanta, Georgia to reconnect with her, explains that she's going to behave when she and Andy are reunited: "I'm a lady … who sells beer with her breasts."
And, like that contradictory and self-aware moment, Road Trip: Beer Pong sums up its own self: It's a good-hearted, smarter-than-it-has-to-be comedy … that sells beer and breasts. Branded as a follow-up to 2000's Road Trip, Road Trip: Beer Pong inspires the skeptical question of why you'd follow up Road Trip with a direct-to-video sequel nine years later and the cynical one of why Paramount waited 9 years; if Universal's pumped out 7 American Pie films, clearly, we're in an age when the line between shameless profiteering and giving fans what they want is harder to find than the bottom line of profit.
And while Road Trip: Beer Pong is nothing new, it is moderately entertaining, as Andy and his trick-shot master team mate Jake (Nestor Aaron Absera) travel along with team "manager" Korkin (Michael Trotter) and comedy-relief nerd Arash (Danny Pudi) to connect with the Beer Pong tour at the championships to see if Andy can rekindle his lost love with Jenna even as he's worried his 5-year relationship with Katy (Julianna Guill) is entering a rut. Will the boys find antics along the way? Will Korkin's devil-may-care seducer meet its greatest challenge in Sarah (Leandra Terrazanno), the shapely head of an abstinence group who offers the boys a ride? Will Arash's character arc been seen as racial insensitivity, in that the only male character who's a person of color is the high-strung horny nerd, or as racial opportunity, in that we're now living in an age where the high-strung horny nerd can be a person of color and have it not be that worthy of comment? Will our troubled underdogs defeat the arrogant Raz-R (Danny Newman) to win the championships? Will Andy choose the newness of Jenna, or what he's built with Katy? And what happened to that bag of weed Jake had to swallow in order to hide it from the cops?
You will probably not think about these things during Road Trip: Beer Pong, because you probably will not think at all, which is as director Steve Rash and writer Brad Riddell intend. Road Trip: Beer Pong is a series of plots strung together — the cross-country drive, the underdog competition, the love triangle — in the sincere hopes that the presence of enough activity (plus the framing sequence starring Road Trip alumni DJ Qualls, as he relates our heroes' tale to a campus tour group) will stretch out the running time and allow for more places in which to insert naked breasts, beer jokes, weed references and smutty talk between the plot points.
And yet for every moment that felt cringe-inducingly flat, there was another in Road Trip: Beer Pong that felt smart, or smart enough, or smarter than you'd expect; Andy and Katie's relationship is treated with seriousness and dignity as neither tediously chaste nor irreparably broken. Korkin's attempts to seduce Sarah involve a real connection with her and her enthusiastic consent, and her asserting her decisions based on what she wants. Of course, she winds up wanting to sleep with him, but the character's written a little more dimensionally than you'd expect for a breast-baring sex farce. All the actors are fine; in fact, they're so good you wish you weren't watching them in something called Road Trip: Beer Pong.
Road Trip: Beer Pong has a ludicrous number of extras; frankly, I have seen Oscar-nominated films released to DVD with fewer bonus materials than Paramount threw at this film. There's a guide to playing beer pong, a look at the making of the film, a lengthy gag reel and seven deleted and alternate scenes. Road Trip: Beer Pong isn't a refined comedy — it's not a sophisticated cocktail sipped from a fine crystal tumbler; it's a sip of watery beer drunk to excess from a plastic cup as in the game that gives it its name. Road Trip: Beer Pong is smarter than it has to be, and it's at least honest about the beer, breasts and bawdy comedy that are its sole reason for existing.
Posted on February 14, 2010 at 9:45 pm
I wonder where they got their beer pong tables from to use in the movie?