Netflix's Comedy Is Juvenile and Hilarious

I would have loved to have seen Bad Trip in a theater. Comedies and horror films have really been blunted by the at-home viewing experience, and while streamers will continue to add these kinds of genres to their libraries, nothing can replace being with a crowd and collectively losing your shit at a good joke or a good scare. Bad Trip was originally supposed to receive a theatrical release, but Orion decided to cut its losses and sell the movie to Netflix. To the film’s credit, the jokes still work so I got some big laughs out of the consistently juvenile and sophomoric humor, but Bad Trip is all about the crowd. It’s about the unwitting crowd that are a part of these stunts, and it should have been about the crowd that gets to enjoy seeing these pranks play out. But even watching the film by myself at home, it felt good to laugh at Kitao Sakurai’s ridiculous movie.

Chris (Eric André) is a lovable loser who can’t hold down a job and never has his act together. When his high school crush Maria (Michaela Colin) wanders back into his life, he wants to profess his love for her. But before he can, she heads back to New York City to host a gallery opening. Chris convinces his best friend Bud (Lil Rel Howery) that they should take the car belonging to Bud’s incarcerated sister Trina (Tiffany Haddish) and road trip up to NYC. Along the way, Chris and Bud get into comical situations while Trina, who has busted out of prison, tracks them down and also gets into comical situations.

The hook here is that while the four actors are always in on the joke, Sakurai has hidden cameras all around these scenarios so that he’s constantly getting reactions and participation from regular people who don’t know that they’re in a movie. It’s a tried-and-true comic construct that adds a bit more energy to the wildness of the comic set pieces when not everyone knows that they’re watching a comic set piece. As silly and simple as it is, there’s a lot of comic value from watching André put his hand a blender and send fake blood flying everywhere while regular people watch on in horror.

The balancing act, of course, is how you can keep pulling these pranks without ever letting them feel mean-spirited. Unlike the Borat movies where Sacha Baron Cohen had specific targets in mind to satirize American values, Bad Tripworks to keep the emphasis on its characters being buffoons and keeping them the butt of the joke. On the one hand, this makes the film a bit redundant. The actors will go someplace, do something outlandish, and then Sakurai cuts to shocked faces with the occasional person providing a more direct action like trying to provide medical assistance or defuse the situation. It’s a weird thing where the regular people add to the comic energy of the scene even if their reactions are typically predictable and inoffensive.

And yet the juvenile stunts the filmmakers chose to pull had me laughing my head off. I won’t spoil anything here, but there are gross-out gags and other hard-R jokes where the joke itself made the scene work. It wasn’t so much about the reaction from the normal people (although everything is predicated here on getting a reaction so the humor is reliably broad and outlandish), but just the set-up and payoff of what the filmmakers constructed. It’s not high comedy by any stretch, but it’s silliness and knowingly juvenile antics makes the movie oddly endearing.

Bad Trip probably shouldn’t work, and yet it does. It shouldn’t work because it’s playing on Netflix rather than in a theater. It shouldn’t work because most of the gags are juvenile pranks played for reaction shots. It shouldn’t work because Bad Trip doesn’t really break the mold of the kind of movie it’s trying to be. But I can’t deny how hard it made me laugh and how much fun I had with it.

Rating: B

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