Summary
Trainwreck: The Real Project X manages to make a wild “party” pretty boring, and leaves the most interesting angle on the table.
Netflix’s run of recent Trainwreck specials has been a mixed bag, wavering wildly in tone to the extent that it’s often unclear whether you’re supposed to be laughing at the subjects or not. When the subject is people being crushed to death at a concert, it’s obvious. But a cruise turning into a floating latrine is a bit more ambiguous. Charting the rise and fall of American Apparel was pretty uninteresting until it became vitally important, and the story of an elected official who smoked crack cocaine with gunrunners only felt relevant because that tenure might have formed a rubric for contemporary politics. The Real Project X is unique, though; it’s the only Trainwreck film I’d describe as legitimately boring.
Considering that the story – clue’s in the title, folks – is about a wildly out-of-control house party, this shouldn’t be the case. Project X, the film from 2012, was a landmark teen comedy in how it permeated popular culture to the extent that a “Project X party” became a universally understood shorthand for a party so great that several people would probably be arrested for attending it. The “real” Project X was widely understood to be a house party in Australia, which a kid named Corey Worthington ill-advisedly advertised on MySpace to the terror of the local Neighborhood Watch. But this movie isn’t about him or that party, but instead, one thrown after the release of the film, inspired directly by it. So, I’m unsure of the word “real” in this context.
Nitpicking aside it’s hard to imagine a less interesting way of presenting this story. It proceeds in roughly chronological order, bolstered by first-hand testimony from the girl whose “party” the event started as and several attendees, many of whom shared the event and a few who took it as an opportunity to riot in the street. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The place is Haren, a small community in the Netherlands. The social media platform is Facebook, not MySpace, but the general idea is the same. An honest party invite was sent out to a group of friends to celebrate a 16-year-old’s birthday. But the event – this being in the halcyon days of people not quite understanding the reach and power of social media – was innocently left public. It was shared far and wide. Then, in a new twist, the original event was closed out of panic, so bad actors cloned it and kept promoting it. As a result, hundreds of Dutch teenagers descended on a small town looking for a good time and found the whole place cordoned off by police.
So, it’s not even about a party, really. Sure, the people who turned up decided to get drunk and play music really loudly anyway, in a lame attempt to make the best of it, but nobody invites the police to a proper party. It quickly became a riot. Tragically, someone was killed, and a whole lot of damage was done. Very few people enjoyed it.
I think the crucial mistake of Trainwreck: The Real Project X is presenting this story largely from the point of view of the people who did enjoy it because there’s something entirely unsympathetic about most of the testimony. People whose thought process defaulted to “Might as well riot” tend not to be the kind of folks you want to spend any meaningful time with. And while the film’s short, it feels long enough to indulge the same spiel about how nobody really meant for things to get as bad as they did, but it’s really not that big of a deal either way (someone died, remember!)
The most interesting angle – this being that the local mayor was forewarned of the event and did nothing to prevent it, despite there being a litany of options for doing so – is left curiously under-explored. Perhaps the logic was that you should only devote one film in a series to an incompetent mayor. But the result is leaving the best material on the table to focus instead on the aspects that aren’t that interesting. By the usual standards of Trainwreck, The Real Project X feels like it’s living up to the title in the wrong way.
RELATED:
- I decided to fan-cast my own Project X party from famously drunk film and TV characters, and I guarantee it would be better than this.
