There’s an Indonesian martial arts film called The Raid that involves some cops who are forced to fight their way out of a tall building. That’s pretty much the whole movie. And I certainly didn’t expect to keep thinking of it while watching Pizza Movie, but life is strange, and so is Pizza Movie.
Strange in a good way, I’d say, or at least that’s the best thing about this new film, which finds two college roommates needing to get from the top of their dorm all the way down to the lobby to get their pizza from a delivery robot. But what they have to fight is reality itself, as they’ve taken some drugs that fell out of the ceiling that are causing them to go through a series of mind-bending experiences, including literal head-exploding time jumps and unexpected body-switches. And I guess they do have to fight the militant band of dorm RAs who are intent on ridding the building of undesirables. And the football team, who one of our heroes accidentally humiliated a while back. Actually, no one likes them at all.
Regrettably, this all sounds a whole lot more fun than it is, entirely because the script is chock full of first-draft jokes and the actors are directed to say those jokes loudly so they seem funnier. This doesn’t work, it never works. You don’t punch up your comedy by yelling your jokes, you do it by writing better jokes. This is apparent from the outset when one of our heroes runs frantically to the laundromat to see a girl before he accidentally tells her he has very dirty undies, and it extends to a meta-joke late in the film where one of the characters realizes he’s in a movie and the filmmakers seem to have decided the simple existence of this scenario is funny enough in and of itself.
It's all a shame, really, because there’s a lot of creativity in how bizarre some of their drug-induced experiences get, and in that limited respect, it’s a little bit delightful. Unfortunately, you can see what a riot Pizza Movie could have been if it weren’t hamstrung by a lack of any real comedy.
Pizza Movie is on Hulu April 3rd.
