Once you notice the wires when he flies across the stage, you're too old for Peter Pan.
Once you notice the seams where the gross-out comedy and the bare-breasted jiggle stuff and the ethnic jokes and all the rest of it have been badly stitched together, you're too old for the National Lampoon movies.
Well, too old, or perhaps not stoned enough.
National Lampoon's Van Wilder is the latest in the line of N.L. puerile comedies. Van Wilder (Ryan Reynolds, a complete Chevy Chase look-alike/act-alike) is a big man on campus, and small wonder, as he has been an undergraduate for seven years. He's just a fun person, everyone loves him, he supports the underdog, and so forth.
When his father cuts off his allowance, Van Wilder earns the money he needs by starting a party-planning business on campus. So he becomes even more popular.
Somewhere in there, Van Wilder gets an assistant (Kal Penn, who is hilarious as Taj) falls in love with a journalism student (Tara Reid), gets on the bad side of her snotty boyfriend (Daniel Cosgrove), loses the girl, gets the girl and graduates. It is so thrilling.
The persons who keep attempting to make the National Lampoon movies funny seem to be confused about the difference between gross-out comedy and inventive gross-out comedy. Quantity is not the issue.
REGURGITATED
Even the target teen-to-25 audience may find they've seen this regurgitated regurgitation material before.
National Lampoon's Van Wilder features all the usual fecal material, semen and vomit gags, disgusting old people interested in sex jokes, ugly body part witticisms, drunk children laughs, bad sexual experience hilarity, fraternity-with-inadvertently-naughty-initials (DIK) laughs, dog's genitals guffaws and so forth.
And the knee-slapping dialogue? Here is a fairly typical exchange between the hero, Van Wilder, and his assistant, Taj Mahal, an inexperienced South Asian exchange student:
Van: "Do you know why I chose you for my assistant?"
Taj Mahal: "So you could teach me how to muff dive?"
Oh, stop, stop, you're killing me.
Love to reciprocate.
(More on: National Lampoon's Van Wilder).
(This film is rated AA)
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