No "Road Trip," but no "Eurotrash" either.

Victor Field

"Eurotrip" isn't really in the same league as the crass but hilarious "Road Trip" (also from DreamWorks Pictures and the Montecito Picture Company), though it shares the same mindset and basic premise of a guy trekking with his friends to sort out a misunderstanding with a lady. Unlike that movie, however, it doesn't have enough momentum to sustain itself all the way; it goes in stops and starts, with moments of real hilarity (like the robot mime duel in France set to "Two Tribes") between bits of the filmic equivalent of dead air.

The movie also has the strikes against it of coming from the writers of the excruciating "The Cat in the Hat," and of having a lead whose name keeps slipping my mind (and in fact the only one of the four principals who is immediately memorable is Michelle Trachtenberg). But this time Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer have a milieu that can take the crudity, and they're to be thanked for not having too many body function jokes (in a choice between flatulence gags and topless blondes with big breasts, the latter gets my vote every time). The heroes's journey through Europe brings up every single stereotype - football hooligans in England, sexually-uninhibited Dutch (shout-out to Lucy Lawless as a dominatrix in Amsterdam), way-behind-the-times Eastern Europeans ("'Miami Vice' number one show!"), sexually predatory Italians ("Mi scusi...") - but they paint the US characters in such similar broad strokes ("Europe's the size of Westwood Mall") that most people won't take offence. And that's quite an accomplishment for a movie which has a little German boy playing at being Adolf Hitler...

It's occasionally even stupider than it has to be, and the big climax in the Vatican (don't ask) could have been better handled, but the supporting cast and the cameos make up for the bland leading man, and it has enough laughs and enough fetching ladies (especially Molly Schade as the girl in the Jacuzzi at the party ["Is it off now?" "Keep rubbing it"] and Jessica Boehrs as the German penfriend who kicks off the plot) to make it a pleasant enough time-passer... although Joanna Lumley's cameo during the outtakes in the credits is an understandable omission from the main body of the film.

Two points to finish off: Jones tells a Vatican employee that he hates the Swiss, a surprisingly prescient remark from an English football fan (United International Pictures released "Eurotrip" in the UK around the time England were knocked out of the European Championships, for which a lot of people blamed the referee... who was Swiss); and Michelle Trachtenberg is not only getting more attractive as she gets older but can also - metaphorically and literally - look down on Sarah Michelle Gellar. Face it, she wasn't the one in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed."

score /10

Victor Field 3 July 2004

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0914979/