Customer Ratings & Reviews

Its a fun road trip film that finds the main character going to his girlfriend's university to stop her from seeing a tape he accidently recorded, having intercourse with another college classmate.

This movie was not to my liking. I believe it would be best viewed by a younger crowd.

The transfer on this disc is not the best but what can you do about it

My Husband pick the movie. I still have not watch it yet.

I just took a look at Road Trip, comedy from way back in 2000. I bought it because it came with a free ticket to see The Hangover Part III and I had a passing interest in seeing it. I am now starting to regret that decision, twofold. The plot is fairly straightforward, with no real surprises in terms of the narrative, but the premise offers plenty of opportunities for funny scenes and characters. Road Trip, unfortunately, misses most of those opportunities. This film was clearly meant to be in the same vein as American Pie, a raunchy college comedy, but it doesn’t quite reach that level, nor that of something like Animal House. Like I said, the plot isn’t too complicated. College slacker Josh Parker (Breckin Meyer) has a girlfriend named Tiffany (Rachel Blanchard), his childhood sweetheart, but they attend different colleges, with Josh at the fictional University of Ithaca in New York State and Tiffany at the University of Austin, Texas. He has a tryst with classmate Beth (Amy Smart), which she lets him videotape. Said tape is accidentally mailed to Tiffany as part of Josh’s ritual of him sending her video journals, or something like that. Now Josh and his buddies have three days to drive from New York to Texas to intercept the tape before Tiffany sees it. It’s pretty straightforward, no real problems plot or narrative wise, with one glaring exception. The plot is set in a frame story, a set of flashbacks narrated by Tom Green’s character, which I’ll go into detail with later. This framing device is pointless. If taken out, there is no loss to the plot. In fact, he could’ve just as easily been narrated by Meyer’s character. During this trip, there are a decent variety of scenes and environments given the road path that the friends take. The cinematography is decent, but nothing special. The soundtrack is typical of the late 1990s early 2000s era, mostly mellow college rock; again, nothing to write home about. The shenanigans that the characters get into, typical of this “crazy adventure” type story, are hit and miss, mostly miss. Thankfully though, a lot of the unfunny jokes don’t last very long, and are typically scene-enders. The gross-out type comedy that is prevalent in this genre is kept to a minimum without any real loss of the comedy, or this case, lack thereof. The fan-service scenes are gratuitous, of course, but that’s the point in this genre; they serve their purpose. The dialogue between the characters is a natural and believable, given the characters and the situations that they find themselves in; most of it isn’t pointless, but there are some hiccups. The acting and the characters are really were this film drops the ball. It’s hard to remember, but these actors seem a little bit too old for college kids, even for back then, but for suspension-of-disbelief’s sake, I’m willing to forgive that. First of all, not everything is bad. Amy Smart is nice and likable, the girl-next-door type. She does okay, with a good and believable mix of strength and vulnerability. DJ Qualls as Kyle is squirrelly and vulnerable, but not wholly feeble. His friends do take advantage of him, but it all does seem to be in good fun, and he takes it in stride well enough. He is the “pathetic loser” type typical of teen films, not unlike Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (played by Alan Ruck), right down to the overly strict father. Unlike Cameron, Kyle does eventually confront his father directly, rather than it being implied, and although this particular plotline’s resolution is not terrible, it’s not particularly satisfying either. Breckin Meyer is barely passable. He almost delves into blandness, but not quite enough to destroy the performance, but he does straddle that line a little too closely for my taste. Paulo Costanzo as Rubin is boring, emotionless, and uninteresting; if he obviously doesn’t care about what’s going on around him, why should we? He’s the stoner/slacker stereotype, and he doesn’t diverge from that trope at all, and much of the plot can take place without him without any real loss. Sean William Scott plays . . . somebody. I forget the actual character name, but let’s face it, he’s just playing Stifler from the American Pie films again. Seriously, the character is no different, essentially a copy-and-paste with no discernible changes whatsoever. But I suppose that is the point, as Sean William Scott was typecast for that character type. If you found Stiffler funny, you’ll find Stifler 2.0 funny in this film too. Anthony Rapp’s character of Jacob is a stock psycho/stalker type; he’s clichéd and lame, and only serves to poorly fill the “bully” stereotype, but he doesn’t really look the part. There are some funny cameos, however. Horatio Sanz, from Saturday Night Live fame, has one of the few really funny parts in this film. It’s of the gross-out variety, but not too bad and hilarious nonetheless. Jimmy Kimmel also has a cameo that’s pretty funny; see if you can catch it. There’s also a brief appearance by John Ross Bowie, whom you probably know as Barry Kripke of The Big Bang Theory fame. Of course, Andy Dick is an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise good cameo list. But all of this, good and bad, is nothing compared to the true horror of this film, the un-equally terrible Tom Green. Tom Green is abysmal this film; by far, he is the worst thing about it. He is annoying and unfunny. For the life of me, I cannot remember or understand why we as a nation ever found him funny, and frankly, I’m ashamed of it. Like I said before, he’s the narrator for the frame story, but I already went over how pointless that was. In fact every scene he’s in is pointless and goes nowhere. Not one bit of it is funny, just annoying and obnoxious. Everything about this character is painful. His name is Barry Manilow, something that I believe that the real Barry Manilow regrets immensely. Tom Green’s scenes are painful in every sense of the word to watch. The only good one is where the snake tries to eat him, and man, do I wish it did, but then again, Tom Green is nearly impossible to stomach. The ending, which I won’t give away here, is kind of anti-climactic, in the sense that it just sort of happens without any real tension or build-up. I will give the film credit for this though: the way the situation resolves is unconventional and unexpected, and even grown-up in its own way. The standard epilogue for this type of film, that being the “what happened to them afterward” footnotes are uninteresting for all the characters, and don’t do any of them any real justice, what little there was to be done. The DVD extras are standard, mostly trailers. The trailer itself is mostly more Tom Green, so it’s just annoying. He also hosts the making-of documentary, so that’s also worthless. The deleted scenes were left out for reason, as they are even less funny than what made it into the film, and many of them are just mean-spirited. Skipping the DVD extras will most likely do you more good than otherwise. Overall, this film is boring, forgettable, and only slightly funny in some rare parts. That being said, it’s not outright terrible, but it comes darn close, almost too close for comfort. There could’ve been some genuine comedy here, but the opportunity is mostly missed out on. Unless you’re really a fan of just this genre of raunchy college comedy films, you’re better off passing on it.

This is a good film for an afternoon with nothing to do. If you liked Hangover and/or the American Pie series, then you will like this movie

I like this movie. It's not spectacular, but it does provide quite a few chuckles. The DVD's extra features are a little disappointing. recommended.

I bought this with a gift card. Pretty funny movie.