Existing in a void where Road Trip and Old School are the virtual Adam and Eve of movie creation, EuroTrip represents the latest pestilence from DreamWorks’s subterranean id-grinder. Written by the triumvirate of scribes responsible for The Cat in the Hat (one is credited as the director here as well), the film sputters alongside four dimensionless Ohio high school grads as they follow their Frommer’s through London, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, Rome, and eventually—in a transition backed hopelessly by “99 Luftballoons”—Berlin.
Make that lead balloons. Audience members whooped it up when our hero’s email account snarled “Mail, motherfucker!” and when Seann William Scott’s appointed heir, Jacob Pitts, whose range of expression is about on par with a ventriloquist’s dummy, was violated by a leafblower-sized instrument. But as with Road Trip and Old School, the filmmakers are tone deaf when it comes to imaginative perversity. The gags with a subversive origin, such as the climatic vandalization of the Vatican or a wet kiss between a twin brother and sister, reek of mold. (The incestuous twins footnote makes me think that perhaps EuroTrip’s only purpose in this world is as a primer for Bernardo Bertolucci’s enticing The Dreamers.)
Still, the film isn’t ignorant of its target audience—horny boys—and in one scene the swish pan of the camera pauses and backtracks in order to ogle a leggy Latina, as if Robert Evans were operating the Steadicam with white spittle in the corners of his mouth. Lacking even a whiff of the Farrelly brothers’ generosity, the EuroTrip team exert languid mirth in equating “airhead” with “fuckable,” which could explain why the only liberated female in the whole film is played by Lucy Lawless—naturally, as a dominatrix equipped with juiced-up testicle clamps.
And hers isn’t the only star cameo: Matt Damon is beneath contempt as a skinhead rocker, in what one hopes was the result of a stumble onto the wrong soundstage. About EuroTrip’s midpoint, the cast gets stuck sharing a tight train compartment with a fey Italian gentleman (Fred Armisen) and noxious attempts at bodily comedy ensue. But as the train throttles through a tunnel, the scene also yields the film’s most pleasing image: a blank screen.
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