Road Trip tries hard to imitate the gross out humor and care free attitude but entirely forgot to make its characters believable. E.L. (Scott), for instance, is completely shallow. He exists simply as an excuse for somebody to act really badly. Tom Green's character is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. This character serves next to no purpose to the story. He's there to add some strange behavior. I'm willing to bet his part was mostly unscripted so that Green could just do his thing. This does produce some good laughs but is ultimately meaningless to the movie.
The story is simple. Josh and Tiffany have been together since they were 5 years old. After high school she went to school in Austin, Texas and he went to college in Ithaca, New York. They talk every day, trying to maintain a long distance relationship. There are a couple days where Josh can't reach Tiffany and he starts to think she's cheating on him. Enter Beth who seduces Josh and for some reason uses his camcorder to record it. The tape is accidently switched for the one Josh recorded to send to Tiffany and gets mailed. Realizing this he and his buddies talk a geeky kid into taking his car and driving cross country to retrieve the tape before Tiffany gets it.
Make sense? Doesn't matter because they're off and running. Things go wrong forcing the guys to come up with new ways to keep the trip moving. I won't get into that because the only really good laughs are in this trip. Green's character stays behind to feed a snake. This little concept is stretched as far as possible and just a bit further too. Beth meanwhile finds out where Josh is heading and goes to confront him except she thinks he's headed to Boston, not Austin (say it out loud, they sound just a tiny bit alike). Both of these subplots add next to nothing to the movie and detract from the actual road trip which is the only thing that works on any level.
As I said there is some gross out humor in the movie. It gets some laughs but nowhere near the levels of recent comedies like American Pie or There's Something About Mary.
Don't even get me started on the ending which adds all new meaning to the phrase anti-climactic. All of the sub-plots should have come crashing to a head in a really funny scene. Not only doesn't that happen but we get an ending so weak that I could actually feel the air pressure in the room drop as the movie had the wind sucked out of it. Think of the moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis have the life sucked out of them and you'll get an idea of the kind of deflating I'm talking about. I think the idea was to make the ending highly ironic but it missed so badly that what little momentum the movie had slammed into a brick wall and died.
There are a few good laughs in the movie but not nearly enough to support its rather short running time. Unless you're really desperate for comedy, dying to see a lot of nudity or a huge Tom Green fan, I'd recommend skipping this one.
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