Scotty Doesn’t Know

We’d just talked about Road Trip, the critically panned but financially successful (if maybe not as successful as the studios would have liked) teen sex comedy from studios Dreamworks and The Montecito Picture Company. It was clear that the studios felt there was life in the format, and the genre, but that a direct sequel to Road Trip was, perhaps, not the best move to continue the franchise. As such, a standalone film was developed within the genre that, while not carrying over any characters or crew from the previous film, a kind of sequel was put into production: EuroTrip.

To be clear, this is not a sequel to Road Trip. It’s entirely possible that the creative team behind EuroTrip didn’t even expect to make a film that tied in well with the previous film. Director Jeff Schaffer and his writing partners Alec Berg and David Mandel put together the script and had it picked up by Dreamworks for development. I can’t find much in the way of information about the exact order of when parts of the film were put together in preproduction, or who had the thought to get it all set up, but even without that information, the connection between EuroTrip and Road Trip is pretty clear. The same format, the same genre, the same studios behind it. It’s as close to a stealth sequel as you can get without everyone coming right out and saying, “yeah, we wanted to make another Road Trip.”

But, aside from the different cast, there is one key difference between the films: EuroTrip is actually legitimately funny. Road Trip is a bad movie with unlikable characters reading from a script that thinks it's funny when it really isn’t. It tries so hard to be amusing, putting everything that its writer / director Todd Phillips thought was amusing. His idea of humor (at least in that film) didn’t work, though, and Road Trip (despite making money) is a total dud. EuroTrip, on the flipside, actually has solid jokes, humorous performances, and a lighthearted attitude that makes it a ton of fun to watch. And yet this was the cinematic dud at the Box Office, not the first film. Sometimes there’s no justice in Hollywood.

Scotty Thomas (Scott Mechlowicz), is a recent high school graduate who just can’t catch a break. His long-term girlfriend, Fiona (Kristin Kreuk) – who he saw himself going to college with before they got married – dumped him at graduation because, in truth, she’d been cheating on him for over a year. Then at a graduation party, Fiona jumps on stage with the band to sing “Scotty Didn’t Know,” a song all about the lead singer’s affair with Fiona. Meanwhile, his best friend, Cooper Harris (Jacob Pitts), gets in his head about Scotty’s German penpal, telling Scotty the guy, Mieke (which Scotty pronounces as “Mike”), is just a creep wanting to molest him. When Mieke emails saying, “hey, I’m coming to America. Do you want to meet up?” Scotty freaks out and tells Mieke off, telling them to never contact him again.

When Scotty wakes up the next morning, seriously hungover from everything he drank at the party, his little brother, Bert (Nial Iskhakov), tells him that Mieke is not a dude but a girl, and that the picture Scotty had of Mieke and “his” hot cousin is actually of a very hot “Mieke” and her awkward cousin. Scotty realizes he’s fucked up and that he actually really likes Mieke now that he realizes she’s a woman (played by Jessica Boehrs). He gets the hairbrained idea (put there, in part, by Cooper) to fly to Europe, travel to Berlin, and track Mieke down, all so he can profess his love and make things right.

To be clear, EuroTrip is a very silly movie. It’s very funny, and it doesn’t take itself seriously, but it’s also the kind of comedy that would largely only be funny to American audiences. It does trade in a bit of European stereotype humor (Britons are football hooligans, Amsterdam citizens are all crazed sex freaks, East European people are poor and sad, Germans are all Nazis, and more) that would likely turn off many viewers in those countries, and that’s fair. But the film plays it all with such a light touch that it’s really hard to take anything in the film seriously. Well, for the most part.

Say what you will about playing in stereotypes, but there is a lot of humor gleaned from these gags. While equating all British football fans to low-brow soccer hooligans would be rude in most contexts, the film casts Vinnie Jones as the leader of the crew, Mad Maynard, as the leader of the crew and he has such a grand time playing the role that it doesn’t feel like the film and making fun of the characters. While in France Scotty gets into a fight with a silver-painted “robot” street performer, which clearly feels like the film is making fun of mimes and other forms of French performance. Except the fight is done with Scotty also performing as a robot, and it’s so dumb and silly you can’t help but laugh. And then over in Eastern Europe, when the kids are broke (having just been robbed) they think they’re screwed since they only have a buck-eighty American to their name. But then they learn the exchange rate is awesome. When a bellhop gets tipped a nickel and says, “I quit! Now I can finally open my own hotel!” it’s so over-the-top and stupid it makes it funny. The film understands the humor it’s courting… well…

I will note that there was one character, Fred Armisen's Creepy Italian Guy, that goes way too far with his jokes. The whole premise of his character is that he’s a creeper who likes to slide into train carriages and molest young men when they aren’t expecting it. This is a pretty awful gay panic gag, playing heavily on the idea that gay people are all creepy molesters (a “joke” that has been around for a while) and it’s not even funny in the slightest when put here. These scenes add nothing but cringey humor that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. Outside this character, the film nails its humor pretty well.

It also has a game cast that is very likable. Mechlowicz’s Scotty is cut from the same cloth as American Pie’s Jim, a guy just trying to do right and not get into trouble. He’s likable and nice and, in an improvement over other films in this genre, doesn’t commit any horrific sex crimes while on his adventure. Pitts’s Cooper is clearly supposed to be the Stifler of the film, but Pitts isn’t that kind of actor. He plays his sleazy, cheesy character with a certain dry wit that makes him feel like something other than a retread of a character we’ve seen before. The film also has two co-leads, Michelle Trachtenberg's Jenny and Travis Wester's Jamie, and while the film doesn’t really have as much for them to do, plot wise, they’re both funny in the scenes the film gives them, and they also bring a likable energy to the film.

Just, in general, the film is likable. It’s not outrageous (for the most part) or packed to the gills with crude humor, crass situations, and a ton of lewd content. That might be part of the reason why this film didn’t take off at the Box Office the way other teen sex comedies had. Or maybe the genre, which had really seen a re-boom with American Pie in 1999, was already on its way back out by the time EuroTrip dropped in 2004. Whatever the case, a film that I think is actually really funny, died at the Box office, making a paltry $22.6 Mil against its $25 Mil budget, making it a certified Box Office Bomb.

It’s sad because it is, by and large, very funny. In a sea of sex comedies where their main characters are all sex offenders-in-training, and no one seems to care about ladies outside of being able to have sex with them, EuroTrip had a likable cast of characters that actually seem like nice people. They have a female best friend that they treat with respect, their goal isn’t sex all the time but (at least for Scotty) actual love, and they want to be decent people when all is said and done. Audiences might not have wanted a nice film in this debauched genre, but I think that’s what gives this film legs while many of the others have become tarnished in the intervening years.