Adventureland

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For his ostensibly weightier followup to one of the crudest (and funniest) teen sex comedies of recent memory, Superbad director Greg Mottola’s Adventureland is surprisingly gutless. It begins with James Brennan (Jessie Eisenberg) nebbishly agonizing over how to afford school in New York through a series of conversations with his parents and his friend Eric (Michael Zegen), ending with his mother reasonably suggesting that he get a job. As exposition, the sequence is unremarkably serviceable, but the stiff intellectual posturing of all the young characters makes it unclear that he's talking about grad school until he explicitly says so. This blurry rendering of maturity is a problem that leaks into every other part of the film. Throughout, it's easy to forget that these characters are adults — albeit young ones — and not just counterfeits of the petty, boob-obsessed teenagers of Superbad. Ironically, despite its obstinate focus on “human drama” over gags, Adventureland is by far the more juvenile of Mottola's two coming-of-age films.

It's difficult to say whether Adventureland fails more as a result of its script (also written by Mottola) or the direction. Shortly after Eisenberg gets a job at the Adventureland Theme Park, he falls for Em (Kristen Stewart), a fellow employee who feels similarly damned by her job. The plot sketches an arc through their familiar “awkward guy plus hot girl” romance as it plays out over the summer of 1987. Not a spoiler: Em is also trapped in a second relationship with the hot maintenance guy (Ryan Reynolds) that prevents her from committing to Eisenberg. Some predictably awkward situations develop, but none of them are inherently funny. Indeed, the closest thing the film has to a plot-driven joke is a recurring series of nut-punches. Which is apt.

Of course, Superbad's plot wasn't anything special either: Two horny teenagers try to get laid, hijinks ensue. The difference is that Superbad's protagonists were designed around the improvisational wit of their performers, resulting in two characters whose barely concealed smirks mirrored the audience's own. Adventureland is hard to laugh along with in the same way. Whenever an opportunity for riffing presents itself, Mottola lets one or two lines squeeze out before abruptly cutting away, as though he doesn't want any of that low comedy nonsense polluting his art. Unfortunately, the film's best moments are these end-of-scene gags, often delivered in a Woody Allen timbre by Eisenberg, or in Reynolds’s affable deadpan. Outside the collected two-and-a-half minutes of passable cut-ups, Adventureland is a mediocre bore, stuffed with too many clichés and stock characters to come anywhere near the Graduate-style dramady it's obviously aiming to be. Clearly, Mottola should stick to dick jokes.