You’ve got to hand it to Warner Brothers and producer Todd Phillips (“The Hangover”): They have painstakingly engineered the perfect film for today’s attention-impaired audiences. Are you a texter? A talker? Have at it. There is no way you could make this movie stupider or more pointlessly noisy than it already is.
Borrowing from many an earlier house-party movie, first-time director Nima Nourizadeh does away with plot, character development, articulate dialogue and humor in favor of something much more elemental: hot bitches. (The ugly ones, you’ll be relieved to know, were not invited.)
You know that scene where the party gets a little too big, and then someone seemingly gets hurt, and the crowd falls silent, and then the person pops back up, unharmed and everyone cheers? That is this entire movie.
But just for fun, I’ll sketch out what passes for a story, giving credit where credit is due. Three not-so-popular high school guys, one of them incredibly obnoxious (“Superbad”), decide to throw a killer party at the main kid’s house while his parents are away (“House Party”) because they are desperate to get laid (“Weird Science”). Word goes out to absolutely everyone (“Sixteen Candles”) and things get totally out of hand, which you know because somebody gets on the roof (“Almost Famous”). The main kid, whose birthday it is, thinks about taking his chances with the hottest girl in school, and it actually looks promising (“Can’t Hardly Wait”). The crowd lays waste to the house, but the only thing that really freaks the kid out is when someone messes with Dad’s fancy car (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”). Then an angry criminal shows up and things go from bad to worse (“Risky Business”).
You are clearly supposed to be blown away by the level of debauched insanity on display here, but I was pretty underwhelmed. Maybe it’s because I have seen boobs in a movie before. The finale, which involves a flamethrower and a near-riot, is the first semi-interesting moment, but just as you’re starting to sit up in your seat, it’s over.
Nourizadeh alternates between that now-obligatory hand-held footage — shot by erstwhile YouTube sensation Dax Flame, in a small role — and a more polished style that begins to seem like one long video for the admittedly pretty decent tunes spun by the party’s two DJs. (Two DJs! Get out!)
It all amounts to nearly an hour and a half of what should be a five-minute scene in a movie where things actually happen — things other than the terrier getting stoned, other than naked chicks in a Bouncy Castle, other than an endless parade of gay and fat jokes. (Really? Still? I know I’m an Old, but I kind of thought/hoped that stuff was played out by now.)
Birthday boy Thomas (Thomas Mann) bears a passing resemblance to the long-faced Alan Ruck, a k a Cameron in “Ferris Bueller.” I hope this wasn’t intentional, because all it does is make you long for him to say something amusingly whiny as he frets about his parents’ stuff getting trashed. (No luck there.)
Dispatched straight from the id of a horny 15-year-old boy, “Project X” is a middle finger aimed at conventional moviemaking. Unfortunately, it’s way lamer than the target of its beer-soaked ire.