Trash this Euro movie

Do you enjoy incest, Hitler jokes, and dated stereotypes? Do you have the mental capacity of a five year-old? Are you longing for a savagely bad film with massive plot holes? Even if you circled D) All of the above, you still will not like Eurotrip.

In case anyone has ever wondered what would happen if you took one of the producers of Road Trip and Old School, teamed him up with a group of hackneyed writers, a first-time director (Jeff Schaffer), and a group of unproven actors, Eurotrip has an answer: 92 minutes of agony.

Scotty (Scott Mechlowitz, whose name was left unchanged presumably to avoid confusing the young actor) has just graduated high school in time for his girlfriend to dump him and reveal that she has been cheating on him. As if that weren't bad enough, at the graduation party that night he is subjected to a song, all about how unperceptive Scotty is, sung by the girl's new punk rocker boyfriend (Matt Damon, who probably was paid in cash.)

Scotty stumbles home and, in a moment of drunken foolishness, replies angrily to the latest e-mail from his German pen-pal; the next morning he discovers that his pen-pal is not, as he had thought, a guy named Mike, but a gorgeous girl named Mieke (Jessica Boehrs). Mieke, after receiving the angry letter, blocks Scott's e-mails, and decides to go pout.

Instead of creating a new e-mail account to get back in contact with Mieke, Scott decides to fly to Berlin with his wisecracking pal Cooper (Jacob Pitts) from Oberlin College, where they now go to school. Despite knowing almost nothing about Mieke, including where in Berlin she lives, he goes to visit her.

At Cooper's suggestion, the duo fly first to London, where they narrowly escape death by miraculously guessing the Manchester United fight song (?!?) then make it to Paris, where they meet up with twins Bert (Nial Iskhakov) and Jenny (Michelle Trachtenberg).

Road Trip, the 2000 movie of which Eurotrip is a spin-off, worked in part because everything that happened was in some way related to the central plot of getting to the girl. Eurotrip feels as if one writer (there are four here actually, never a good sign) would pitch an idea to the others, be told that it didn't fit into the script, then yell "Who cares!?" and write it in anyway.

One also gets the sense that a young child with scissors attacked the final cut of the movie, removing large chunks. Within those chunks might have been humor and a cohesive plot. Neither is apparent in the final product. What remains are a series of loosely-related misadventures, usually in bad taste, and always completely implausible.

If you are intending to see this film, skip the next sentence ... although, if you are intending to see this film you probably cannot read or write anyway, and therefore will be unaffected.

The climax of this movie, or more accurately the merciful end, comes when Scotty opens his dorm room door to discover that Mieke has somehow applied and gotten into Oberlin College, about six months after the deadline, in the two months since they met. Adding insult to injury, Mieke, being mistaken for a male, has been assigned to be Cooper's roommate. (!?!)

Whereas usually you have to reflect upon a movie hours after seeing it to notice plot holes, Eurotrip defies the norm. The movie is reminiscent of Grady Little's managing; the audience notices problems as the debacle unfolds. How did our hero manage to track down his pen-pal without her last name, phone number, or address? Why didn't Scotty just fly directly to Berlin? Who agreed to make this movie, and why?

Fred Armisen (of Saturday Night Live) does his best to inject this listless movie with some humor, but again the writers fall short. His brief appearance is as funny as it is unexplained. It is unclear why he decides to make sexual advances on the group, and equally unclear why he gives up.

I would suggest that you take your young children to Eurotrip to be amused by the colors and noise; however, I doubt most of this paper's readers have young children ... and there's also the matter of the gratuitous full-frontal male nudity.

Do not see Eurotrip, even when it is released on video. If your friends try to drag you to see it, find new friends. If you are forced in at gunpoint, bring a book and a flashlight.