The reviews are in for the Todd Phillips-produced uber-party comedy Project X , and three out of four critics agree: It is the douchiest, most mean-spirited debauch of the year. (To date, anyway; we’ll see what kind of revisionist zest Steven Spielberg and co. bring to Lincoln .) Hop aboard Movieline’s scorched-earth golf cart and let’s go for a spin… 9. “You’ve got to hand it to Warner Brothers and producer Todd Phillips: 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.” — Sara Stewart , NY Post 8. “It would be easy to say Project X objectifies women, if the word ‘object’ didn’t imply too much dignity.” — Keith Phipps , AV Club 7. “Although it behaves as if its closest antecedent is a John Hughes teen movie, Project X plays more like a blend of music video, College Rules-style porn, and apocalypse-gazing. It’s all hyper-sensory flash and amateur titillation, ain’t it cool party-dogging and an ecstatic taxonomy of all the different ways you can drink a beer.” — Michelle Orange , Movieline 6. ” Project X ’s title has no bearing on its premise: a teenage house party in a quiet Californian suburb that spirals out of control. Nor is it connected to the 1987 film of the same name in which Matthew Broderick rescues a band of tormented chimpanzees, unless perhaps the chimpanzees wrote it. Overall, it’s flamboyantly loathsome on every imaginable level, and a great many unimaginable ones besides.” — Robbie Collin , The Telegraph 5. “[Oliver] Cooper’s brash, bragging Costa, in particular, is the most annoying movie character since Jar Jar Binks. You’d never tire of punching him. Let’s take all prints of the film, and bury them. Don’t bother marking the spot with an X.” — Chris Hewitt , Empire 4. “How bad is it? It kicks off the proceedings with the soundtrack blaring the 2 Live Crew classic ‘Hey, We Want Some Pussy,’ and that winds up constituting the closest that it comes to both quiet dignity and quality writing. It is so bad that it deploys a running gag featuring shenanigans involving a pet dog that even Michael Vick might take offense at.” — Peter Sobczynski , eFilmCritic 3. “It is not normal adolescent rebellion depicted here: it is sociopathic insurrection. It’s an orgy of destruction that is meant to be cool. And it’s not a cautionary tale. It’s not a warning that recognizes that real-life teenaged boys can indeed be colossal idiots sometimes, and perhaps we need to work together as a society to minimize the damage they can do, like perhaps training up our sons to be responsible citizens. It’s a celebration of colossal adolescent idiocy as something we should all aspire to, and would do, if we could only be as awesomely cool as a horny 17-year-old boy.” — Maryann Johanson Flick Filosopher 2. ” Project X is classless, mean-spirited, repugnant, deplorable, off-puttingly sleazy, and thoroughly contemptible. It is also searingly depressing — there isn’t a true laugh in sight — as well as worthless on every cinematic level one could name, imagine, or dream up.” — Dustin Putman , DustinPutman.com 1. “[A] certain self-justifying, feel-good impulse compels the filmmakers to imply that, even if [the characters] do nothing further of note in their lives, they’ll always have this. Herein lies the film’s lack of point-of-view, leaving it to the viewer to decide if the import of the evening is a joke, a tragedy, an irony or a victory. Despite a couple of unconvincingly upbeat tacked-on moments at the end, Project X basically reads as nihilistic, as not believing in or standing for anything. Not even fun.” — Todd McCarthy , The Hollywood Reporter Reviews via Rotten Tomatoes . Browse more of Moveline’s Scathing Critical Response features here . Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
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The 9 Most Scathing Critical Responses to Project X
