Joel on Film

Rude-and-crude comedies used to be as funny as they were broad—as good-natured as they were lewd—and Pizza Movie, which is exceptionally funny and cleverly devised, recalls just such a period, specifically around 20 to 25 years ago, when these movies flourished. The idea here is nearly too simple to imagine that writers/directors Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney could do much of anything with it, but the filmmakers do not merely exceed our expectations on that front. They plow right through those expectations and go several steps further in proving why one mustn’t judge what a movie is capable of achieving by merely reading a one-sentence synopsis.

Indeed, one could very easily reduce the entire narrative experience of this movie to a single sentence: A pair of college students, after accidentally ingesting mysterious drugs, must seek a specific pizza pie to quash the side effects of their high. From here, Kocher, McElhaney and the film’s ensemble of actors open the floodgates of crudeness, rudeness, lewdness and, most importantly, fun. It’s genuinely impressive how much inventiveness is mined out of this deceptively simple premise.

The two friends are Jack (Gaten Matarazzo), who has been enjoying a bit of major backlash as a result of something he did to the university football team, and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone), whose meekness constantly gets the better of him in just about any social situation. These two are immediately likable, in spite or even because of their negative social standing, so that we root for a poor guy like Montgomery when he pines for the cute and apparently innocent Ashley (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and celebrate with him when he realizes that neither her cuteness nor her “innocence” is at all what Ashley is about. In the first of many, many successful jokes about our expectations of these characters (even the supporting ones who shouldn’t have as many characteristics as the ones here do), Ashley is obsessed with a certain type of music—and achieves it with, well, a most peculiar “instrument.”

Discovering character details like that is about as underrated an experience as it gets with comedies like this one, which sees Jack and Montgomery ingesting M.I.N.T.s—not at all breath-freshening hard candies, obviously, but ultra-powered hallucinogenics that will inevitably lead them down a drug-induced spiral of random adventures and experiences. The funniest thing about these experiences, though, is that the filmmakers have conceived of them as existing somewhere between hallucinatory fantasy and genuine reality. It’s a little hard to explain better than that, but essentially, their experiences with other people in the university—a bully played by Jack Martin, a delivery robot voiced by Bobby Moynihan, and a third addition to the friend group, who becomes quite important on their journey and is played by Lulu Wilson—are definitely real.

Then again, there is also the stretch when a body-swap scenario occurs between the hapless Montgomery and another being, voiced by Daniel Radcliffe, that should absolutely not be revealed in a review. It’s a particularly funny sight, though, to see the other being suddenly have to figure out how to cope with the presence of a human mind inside it, while its human counterpart just-as-suddenly takes on the properties of the other being, with unexpected results all-around. Then, there’s the matter of the other comic scenarios on display here.

The body swap, basically, is what counts as a “simple” drug side effect, but there are other ones, which involve stages of drug-laced existence that are each uproariously funny. The best one is probably when the friend pair must not use swear words, which involves first defining both the definition of “swear” and then accounting for the culture in which the two young men both currently operate (the immediate, punctual and cyclical consequences for uttering a curse word are never not funny). Then, there are “flashbacks” to previous periods of their lives, except for the thing where those “flashbacks” are slightly interactive.

This, though, is not merely a comedy with a bunch of throwaway gags, no matter how many of those technically exist or how terrifically they are pulled off. The movie also has a massive bear-hug of a heart, as we learn that one of these friends is not planning to stay around while the other attends this particularly university, placing the status of their fastened-to-the-hip friendship. That’s all revealed during a side effect that forces Jack, Montgomery and their estranged-but-reunited friend Lizzy (the one played by Wilson) to tell the unvarnished truth.

Does every comic idea pan out in Pizza Movie? Perhaps not, such as a busy finale in which the filmmakers have decided that the external conflict of the villain (a resident assistant intent upon weeding out disloyal students under his purview) needs to result in a big, wacky confrontation of a truly-out-there kind, but since when is throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks an automatically bad thing?

Rating: ***½ (out of ****)