National Lampoon's Van Wilder (2002)
Grade: C-
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Tara Reid, Kal Penn, Daniel Cosgrove, Tim Matheson
Director: Walt Becker
Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity/bulldog testicles, gross humor, language, and some drug content


Ah…semen. Where to start? I could write a whole essay on semen in the movies, but I won’t—I’ll only say that cinematic squirting and ejaculatory entertainment is certainly wearing thin. While the bodily fluid was used famously and freshly in “There’s Something About Mary”, “American Pie”, and “Scary Movie”, many teen movies are rushing to out-cum their previous outrageous predecessors. You know your movie is desperate when the sperm donor is a bulldog with testicles roughly the size of Danny DeVito, and you know the movie is just plain bad when the sperm recipient is a dessert, and the title is not “American Pie”.

The movie in question is “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder”, an amiably unsuccessful college comedy that tries to redo the comically brilliant success of 1978’s “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (one of my favorite comedies of all time). It fails. But of course it does. It can’t decide what its main character should be like.

Yes, “Van Wilder” is dragged down by its most valuable asset: Ryan Reynolds. I believe the only other place I’ve seen him is the TV show “Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place”, but I really like the guy. As actors of his age go, he shows more promise than most. However, his character here is an orgy of conflicting personality traits that consistently confuse the audience and screw up jokes. His Van Wilder is a mixture of sweet Christian kindness, Austin Powers horndogged-ness, and…well…charmingly sarcastic and sardonic wit. I like unpredictability in characters, but this is bad for a character like Van Wilder. With characters like him, the unpredictability should come in how he acts, not what mindset he has chosen for the situation. Because of the script’s indecisiveness with him, “Van Wilder” loses a lot of potential laughs because we halt ourselves before laughing. Reynolds occasionally gets a great Chandler Bing-esque sarcastic one-liner, but we quickly think to ourselves, “Would that same thing be said by the Van Wilder we saw in the last scene?” I could possibly forgive this if there were fewer jokes to the effect of: “Check out them nuts on that there bulldog!”

And if you think semen is getting old, just think about the abundance of poop jokes in movies. Poop is almost never funny, and in a film as dumb as this it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a laugh. By ripping off everything about “Dumb & Dumber”’s poop gag except the part of it that is funny, “Van Wilder” went from a movie I was bored with to a movie I disliked. At the time, at least. If a friend asked me tomorrow what I thought about it, my response would be “Eh, some parts were funny. It was alright, I guess.” It’s just so dern likable that awful parts like the poo scene just don’t stick with you like the sweetness of the rest of the film does. I can’t bring myself to hate it, but if I ever start to like it all I need do is remind myself of the bulldog testicles.

The plot: Van Wilder, the most popular guy on campus, has been in college for seven years. His dad then threatens to stop paying for his tuition if he doesn’t graduate this year. What’s a guy to do? Well, one of the requirements is to befriend an Oriental character that will be a comic goldmine because he talks like a horny homeboy. This didn’t work in “How High”, but it almost did, and its effect is similar here.

Van Wilder has a love interest (of *course* he does), a young reporter played by Tara Reid. Reid is pretty and believable (outside her real-life age compared to her role here), but the character is surprisingly flat. When we see Van’s dazed expression around here, we expect that maybe he’s just really understandably smitten with certain body features she is equipped with, because nothing about her personality is sparkling enough to acquire such admiration.

Finally, “Van Wilder” is mediocre but not unbearable. If you get forced into watching it, don’t worry too much, because there are brief comedic ejaculations along the way; just don’t expect a good comedy.


-Alex, September 2002