Otherwise known as 'Where's the Party Yaar?', with yaar Gujurati for friend, this is the first major movie that Kal Penn headlined and is, at the time of writing, the worst of a pretty awful bag of crap in which he has starred. While I don't intend to write this entire review as a Kal Penn-bashathon it's very difficult not to when he is so poor an actor. The man has but one expression: a vacant, slack-jawed, dull-eyed stare, and whenever he talks you just wish someone else in the cast would hit him with a blunt object and put us all out of our misery. There can be of recent times few other actors who have clubbed their ethnic background in a fortuitous career whilst failing to prove that they have the acting skill to underwrite said career. He is a terrible, terrible actor and I for one will shed no tears should he fail to find any more work.
Just, awful. Anyway, the film itself does him no favours, as while he brilliantly manages to fluff every even vaguely amusing line he at least has the excuse that they are few and far between indeed. Dude Where's the Party? looks and feels like a college project given a little too much money. The script is your a-typical fish-out-of-water scenario lazily used by every hack writer wanting to give life to their very own cultural mish-mash. Sunil Malhotra, who is also horrible, portrays Hari, a FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) Indian who moves in with his uncle's family while attending a US College. Now due to certain connections I have made of late I do at least appreciate the many amusing references made to Indians new to the West and its customs. Jokes are made about Hari's appearance and personal hygience, and his silly accent. US-born Indians desperate to appear cool ape Black culture and scorn poor Hari's weak attempts to fit in. Naturally his intelligence and work-ethic allow him to excel at school, but really all he wants is to be able to attend one of the parties his cousin Mo (Penn) promotes.
To be fair the acting all round is pretty poor, most of the cast look like they were corralled into it against their will, and as such are paying back their tormentor with the worst performance they could muster. I count Penn among these naturally. Still, you would have thought a rudimentary understanding of acting would have have been a benefit, clearly they didn't have the time or inclination to bother seeing if anyone would have been capable of filling their role. The lazy bastards. Allied to one of the worst scripts I've ever seen it all leads to disaster. If you don't count the occasional FOB reference there are no jokes in this 'comedy' (just like Van Wilder and Harold and Kumar, and guess who starred in them...) and Mathews clearly has no idea how to direct or effectively edit a movie. Quite often scenes are cut long after their usefulness to the plot has expired, and indeed most should have never been included in the first place. Mathews might have been able to string together a passable ten minute short if he'd had the balls or directorial ethic to remove everything that didn't work, but I guess that was just too much effort for him. Instead we have this trainwreck of a movie, starring one of the worst actors working today. All you'll get watching this is an itchy arse and a sense of profund disappointment. |
