Sex Drive (2008)

VERDICT:
5/10 Cheap Knockoffs

Just another teen comedy about horny kids trying to get laid. Only this one has a Mexican donut suit in it.

Sex Drive follows a High Schooler that steals his brother’s hot rod and drives halfway across the country with his two best friends – a girl he’s secretly in love with and a kid who gets far more play than he probably should – so that he can lose his virginity to a girl he met online.

This might sound familiar, and that’s because it’s pretty much the exact same story as The Sure Thing, which is a pretty funny movie from ’85 about a guy that hitchhikes across the country with a girl he secretly falls in love with, all so that he can get laid by a girl he’s never met. Are you even allowed to rip off a story like that? I don’t know, sounds like some suspect shit to me.

With that said, there’s not a whole lot here that makes Sex Drive stand out amongst the endless amount of gross-out teen comedies that are all trying to be the next Superbad 2 or American Pie 37. First off, we’ve seen the characters before – the main character who’s terrified of girls and blurts out his feelings at the most inopportune times, the secret crush, the dick older brother, etc.,etc. Secondly, the storyline is entirely predictable because, like I said, we’ve seen it all before. And lastly, which is really just a culmination of the first two points, there’s nothing original about this movie.

Then again,  a movie doesn’t have to be groundbreaking to be funny, it just needs to make you laugh.

This leads me to the heart of the matter as to whether Sex Drive is actually funny or not. The answer is kinda sorta, but not really. There are some pretty entertaining bit roles by James Marsden as the older brother who’s convinced the reason his little bro is still a virgin is because he’s gay, and Seth Green as the world’s most sarcastic Amish auto-mechanic. This kid, Clark Duke, is also amusing as the best friend/sex hound of the main character, but he can do better, or at least I think he can. Everyone else, not so memorable.

As you can imagine, a lot of the humor revolves around crude sex antics aimed at making you shuffle around in your seat because we all remember how outrageous it is to be a 16-year-old virgin. I didn’t find myself laughing out loud at all, but I chuckled here and there, mostly at Seth Green. But a lot of the humor is actually totally random and brought on by a chain of events that have nothing to do with the scene at hand and are just there with the aim of grossing you out instead of making you laugh; granted, sometimes those two things go hand-in-hand, but not so much here.

Eh, I just wasn’t a big fan of this movie. It was entertaining, I guess, but it’s already been done and it’s been done better. Go watch The Sure Thing instead, that was a lot funnier if I remember correctly. Sorry, Sex Drive, but if you’re going to steal a storyline, you should probably make sure you’re doing it better than the original.