For the love of anarchy, debauchery and hedonism comes Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X, a video project undertaken by the friends of a nerdish teen upon the occasion of his 17th birthday. When the parents of Thomas (Thomas Mann) vacate the home for the weekend, it’s open slather for his garrulous, obnoxious best friend Costa (Oliver Cooper) to give the potentially lame party some ‘street cred’ by inviting everyone within earshot on school grounds.
Enlisting their overweight friend, JB (Jonathan Daniel Browne) and a fourth guy, Dax (Dax Flame), to videotape their (occasionally) illegal and (hopefully) carnal adventures through the course of this day, Costa goes to every extreme to enliven the party whilst accomplishing his goal of scoring with as many drunken, stupefied hot chicks as his manhood will allow.
Project X (disappointingly not a remake of the 1987 Matthew Broderick and chimp film) is an admittedly entertaining if disturbingly moronic reflection of modern sensibilities. There’s little wrong with good clean fun as defined by young men and women tipping off hormonal and adrenal red alerts with excessive alcohol consumption, but how badly do we crave to see it exploited on film?
Naturally, the entire point of Project X (2012) is to push the envelope, to ramp up the stupidity to such punishing levels it almost subsumes an audience into the sonic and sensory overload. It’s difficult to comprehend the convergence of well over a thousand people on a single suburban location. Australian audiences will be very familiar with a likely inspiration for the film, the 2008 party of Melbourne schoolboy Corey Worthington which saw 500 people stacked into or around his suburban home. His memorable, remorseless post-party appearance on the Today show is even satirised in film’s closing scene.
In the acting stakes, nobody amongst the paralytic hordes rises above a median level of comprehension. Cooper is undoubtedly the film’s centrepiece though with his one-dimensional objectifying of the fairer species, incessant verbal jabbering and vaguely physical resemblance to a younger Jonah Hill sure to both transfix and repel in equal measure.
Though necessarily low on cerebral stimulation, Project X’s undeniable raw entertainment value propped up by the calculated appearances of naked pool dwellers, an infuriated, nut-cracking midget and a rampaging, comeuppance-seeker armed with a flamethrower will ensure you both stay awake to outlast the party and ponder the audacity of the film’s mantra to condone such idiocy.
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