Myles Teller and Skylar Astin star in “21 & Over.” (Photo credit: Relativity Media)
’21 & Over’ leaves you with a hangover
It tries. It tries so hard. If it could pull a hernia, it would have it was trying so hard. And for that, you have to give “21 & Over” some credit. Not substantial credit, mind you, because no matter how hard you try, not everyone wins. And no matter how hard “21 & Over” tries to be the college version of “The Hangover,” it just doesn’t hit the mark. Or maybe everyone is too drunk to hit much of anything.
Recalling a well-worn message that your oldest friends happen to be your weirdest, “21 & Over” fiddles with the premise that absence doesn’t necessarily make the heart grow fonder. It only it had developed the very real situation where your high school best friends become people you hardly know anymore.
Instead, we get a whiplash-inducing crash course in how quickly a group of college-aged guys can botch everything up. We’re talking about “Logic? What’s logic? Why can’t we make two sorority pledges kiss one another and not expect any consequences?” levels of stupidity. It’s never-ending.
And by never-ending, this travesty of booze-infused poor life choices starts from the beginning, where the comically egotistical Miller (Miles Teller, “Footloose”) and the so-proper-he-must-be-no-fun Casey (Skylar Astin, “Pitch Perfect”) surprise their high school friend, Jeff Chang (Justin Chon), by visiting him, unannounced, on his 21st birthday.
Look, maybe in the 1980s you could pop in on an old friend and be able to claim his 21st-birthday shenanigans. These days, you at least need to tweet. So you can only imagine the ridiculous antics that follow once the trio get nice and drunk.
Describing the following debauched events would remove any reason to watch “21 & Over,” so we’ll skim over those. There’s alcohol, women, college life, overbearing parents searching for the obligatory missing person. Let’s just say “21 & Over” was directed by the “Hangover” screenwriting team, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (who also wrote the script). The plot, what little there is, involves Miller and Casey taking a passed out Jeff back home. Why, you ask? Well, because he has a medical school interview in the a.m.
This is all that needs to be about what follows: Why does Jeff allow this to happen, and why does he have a gun?
There are some high points, mainly regarding the snarky relationship between Casey and Nicole (Sarah Wright), who the group met at a bar. But again, instead we get juvenile humor, lackluster plot and character structure and crude, bigoted remarks flying a mile a minute.
Forgetting for a moment the offensive and tone-deaf humor, you just have to wonder: What was the point?
Two “What just happened?” stars out of five.
Silver Screening Reviews 