Van Wilder is the guy that every university seems to have one of - the big man on campus who has managed to turn college life into a vocation, until Van’s corporate exec dad (Tim Matheson, who played Otter in “National Lampoon’s Animal House”) discovers how much of his money is being siphoned away by Van’s “education,” and decides to cut Van off.Īs a movie, “Van Wilder” doesn’t possess significantly greater ambition than its protagonist. Pic’s eponymous protagonist (Ryan Reynolds) is a jocular prankster who’s spent most of his seven years at fictional Coolidge College wreaking havoc on stuffy professors and throwing killer parties. But there’s a fundamental innocence to the film’s hijinx - “Van Wilder” is a titillation, a tease - and the characters here aren’t nearly as hung-up about validating themselves through sex as the characters in most of today’s teen-skewing pics.
It cuts to the chase, which in this case is a parade of scatological jokes and bodacious, bare-breasted babes. Unlike the “Pie” pics, “Van Wilder” doesn’t dally around with faux character-building scenes and treacly sentiment it’s much more connected to what its target audience really wants to see.
Directed by Walt Becker (whose debut feature, “Buying the Cow,” remains on the shelf after the bankruptcy of Destination Films), “Van Wilder” is patterned after the raunchy campus-set romps that flourished throughout the 1980s, and while pic won’t have audiences clamoring for the reissue of “Revenge of the Nerds,” it is, as a revival of the form, preferable to either part of the tame “American Pie” franchise.
0 kommentar(er)
