Project X

Thomas (Thomas Mann) is a loser as they come. To most of his classmates, he is simply invisible. And so it seemed certain that he will spend his birthday again this year only with his buddies Costa (Oliver Cooper) and J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown). But then Costa has the idea that would finally allow the trio to step out of the humiliating shadow of anonymity: Have Thomas throw a party that everyone at school would be talking about for years to come. To record it for posterity, the loner Dex (Dex Flame) from the film club is unceremoniously hired to film the party with his camera. What the guys don't suspect: their party actually turns out to be a blast - but in a completely different way than planned....

If there's anyone in Hollywood who knows about parties, it's undoubtedly Todd Philipps. After all, the director has shown in Road Trip, Old School and, of course, in the two Hangover movies in more than amusing ways what consequences debauched parties can have. For the ultimate party film, Phillips was therefore virtually predestined as a producer. He left the directing to Nima Nourizadeh, who made his feature film debut with Project X. The result is a fun representative of the party. The result is a fun representative of the found footage genre, which until now has primarily produced horror (Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity) or fantasy films (Chronicle). Staging a crude, irreverent and completely politically incorrect comedy in this way could easily have led to an exhausting, rather annoying result. But not only thanks to pleasantly less badly shaky scenes Project X works amazingly well with its home video look.

The film is clearly aimed at a slightly younger audience, for whom it is everyday life to record everything with the help of mobile phones and video cameras and make it available to the general public on portals like YouTube and Facebook. The language used by the protagonists alone is likely to arouse astonishment and blushes of shame in some older viewers. Young people, on the other hand, will be amused by the sometimes very coarse language.

The humor is overall very raunchy, revolves mainly around sex and drug use. Conversations about what you'd like to stick in whom, when and where, lots of naked flesh (or as US late night host Jimmy Kimmel so nicely puts it in the credits, the last time there were this many teenage boobs was at an R. Kelly birthday party) and an orgy of destruction par excellence dominate the proceedings. As an adult viewer, you get the feeling that your own moral sensibilities should actually forbid you from laughing at it. After all, the message of the movie, if you really want to look for it, isn't really a commendable one. The sometimes not exactly exemplary behaviour of the protagonists is hardly condemned. On the contrary. But even when you should be annoyed by it, you catch yourself (if you also like a bit of cruder US comedy) repeatedly breaking out into slightly bashful, but still hearty laughter.

Project X is vulgar, completely over the top and more than politically incorrect. These ingredients, mixed with a delightfully absurd party conceit and extraneous moments, make this comedy, despite some flaws, quite a delight to watch even beyond your 20s for unrestrained fun. If you like the movies of Todd Phillips, you should just put aside all moral reservations and just indulge in this party comedy. Worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp