User:ChessPiece21/sandbox/Sex Drive

Sex Drive is a 2008 American teen sex comedy film directed by Sean Anders, starring Josh Zuckerman, Clark Duke, Amanda Crew, Seth Green, and James Marsden. It is based on the young adult novel All the Way by American author Andy Behrens. The film was a box office bomb and loosely adapted the novel it was based on.

Plot
Ian Lafferty has always been the best friend, not the boyfriend, and he thinks he's the last American virgin. Online, he meets Danielle, who is pretty, sweet, and really seems to like him. The trouble is that they live in different parts of the country. When she makes him an offer to meet up, Ian steals his brother's '69 GTO and goes with his friends Lance and Felicia to meet her in person and lose his virginity.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) It is a very loose adaptation of All the Way that adds pointless teen-comedy tropes to the much more serious tone of the novel.
 * 2) The film has a very heavy reliance on toilet humor, inappropriate slapstick, and gross-out humor, which is rarely funny and somewhat cringeworthy.
 * 3) *Lance and Ian urinate all over the radiator as an attempt to make their car go faster.
 * 4) *Felicia strips in an attempt to get gas.
 * 5) *When a hitchhiker chases the main trio, he urinates on it, too, and tries to touch Felicia's breast when he first sees her.
 * 6) *When Lance has sex with the hitchhiker's daughter, she asks him to "shit on [her]," stating it's her fetish.
 * 7) *Ian's cum sock hits his mother in the face when she walks in on him masturbating.
 * 8) Lazy acting, particularly from Josh Zuckerman (Ian), who has poor chemistry with the rest of the cast. David Koechner (the hitchhiker) and James Marsden (Rex) are also laughably bad.
 * 9) Inconsistent tone - the emotional and heartwarming moments are stopped almost immediately, since the film just crams yet another unneeded joke when it tries to be serious.
 * 10) Some racist and mean-spirited humor, especially towards the Amish when an Amish man helps Ian make it to Tennessee.
 * Rex, Ian's older brother, is a homophobic and racist bully with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
 * 1) The ending feels forced and absolutely ridiculous, especially when Danielle's boyfriend threatens to kill Ian and Felicia.

Redeeming Qualities

 * Ian, Felicia, and Lance are all somewhat likable characters with believable arcs throughout the film.
 * 1) *The ending, with Ian choosing Felicia because of how good she made him feel over the journey, is admittedly heartwarming.
 * 2) Great soundtrack, especially "Time to Pretend" by MGMT and "Fame < Infamy" by Fall Out Boy.
 * 3) Decent performances from Clark Duke (Lance) and Amanda Crew (Felicia).

Reception
The film holds an approval rating of 36% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 111 reviews and an average rating of 4.5/10 on IMDb. On Metacritic, the film has a score of 39 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "below average reviews". The film was a box office bomb, making close to what its budget was.

Trivia

 * Amanda Crew, who played Felicia, and Brett Rice, who played Ian's father, later reunited in Silicon Valley, where Crew was a main cast member and Rice had a guest appearance in one episode.
 * This was the first film Sean Anders directed. He became well-known for writing the screenplay for We're the Millers and directing Daddy's Home and Instant Family.
 * In a 2020 interview, Josh Zuckerman, the film's star, said that this was "one of his favorite movies to work on" and called it "hilariously bad," as well as stating that he is still friends with Clark Duke and Amanda Crew to this day because of the fun times they had together.