Eurotrip Review

Eurotrip DVD Movie Review

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For the most part, I’ve never been particularly wild about teen sex comedies. While they do feature lots of gratuitous nudity (which I’m a big fan of), they also commonly feature a string of unfunny gags and gross-out humor. EuroTrip is the rare genre film which actually gets it right.

The movie opens with a class of high school seniors graduating in Hudson, Ohio. Among them, we have Scott Thomas (Scott Mechlowicz), a nice guy who’s just been dumped by his cheating girlfriend Fiona (Kristin Kreuk), Cooper (Jacob Pitts), his smartass best friend, and Jamie (Travis Wester) and Jenny (Michelle Trachtenberg), “the worst twins ever.”

After being publicly humiliated at a graduation party (with a little help from Matt Damon as a Fiona-boffing lead singer), Scott gets wasted and tells off his longtime German pen pal, Mike, who was planning on visiting him over the summer. Much to his horror, he learns the next morning that “Mike” is actually Mieke (Jessica Bohrs), a smoking hot babe. When he can’t reach her via email, Scott decides to travel to Berlin in person and deliver an apology.

Unfortunately, Scott and his faithful companion, Cooper, don’t have enough money to go directly to Germany, so they touch down in London and bumble their way across Europe towards the land of sauerkraut and The Scorpions (eventually meeting up with Jenny and Jamie in France). As you might imagine, hilarity ensues as these naive Americans rub elbows with an endless horde of eccentric Europeans.

The movie plays out like a twisted travelogue, and each country visited just gets stranger and stranger. From an encounter with soccer hooligans in England, to a mime battle in France, the group is constantly assaulted by every foreign stereotype imaginable. I especially liked the moment when they realized, to their horror, that they had stumbled into Eastern Europe (complete with people throwing human waste from windows and dogs carrying about severed hands).

But despite the constant jokes made at the expense of the Europeans, I never got the feeling that the movie was trying to be mean spirited. Like many real-life American tourists, EuroTrip never really seems to stop and dwell on events. It simply pauses for a moment, laughs, and then moves on to the next occurrence. And while it may certainly be guilty of cultural insensitivity, it commits these violations with a kind of gee-whiz attitude which makes it hard to dislike.

Some of the jokes do seem a little on the desperate side, as though the writer just got lazy and resorted to the most generic gag that he could think of. The most notable examples are the kids freaking out on hash brownies in an Amsterdam bakery and Mieke’s little goose-stepping brother. Whenever you have to resort to Hitler jokes, you know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Don’t get me wrong, I still laughed at these scenes, but surely they could have come up with something more original.

One of the things that really makes this film stand out from the crowd is the stellar cast. The four main characters are very likeable, and unlike in most teen comedies, you wouldn’t really mind having any of them as your own kids. The supporting cast is filled with lots of familiar faces. We’ve got tough guy Vinnie Jones as the leader of the British soccer hooligans, superstar Matt Damon as the lead singer of a band, Jeffrey Tambor as Scott’s clueless father, Diedrich Bader as a mugger, Rade Serbedzija as a Slovakian obsessed with American pop culture, and Xena herself, Lucy Lawless, as the proprietor of a kinky Amsterdam brothel.

While it doesn’t break any new comedic ground, EuroTrip is a harmless little film that has its heart in the right place. With a surprisingly strong cast, solid soundtrack and a number of funny gags, this is one that should appeal to a wide audience. If you happen to be European, however, make sure that you have the ability to laugh at yourself before watching.

Grade: B

If you like this movie, you might also enjoy:

• Old School
• The Girl Next Door
• Stripes

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