College Road Trip...TO HELL!!!!

Recently, I did something that a movie critic is not supposed to do, I reviewed a movie I hadn't seen. That movie was Larry the Cable Guy's new movie Witless Protection. Despite the fact that I committed what is normally considered to be some sort of journalistic mortal sin, I feel that future generations will not only vindicate me for what I did but actually put actually worship me as a national hero. Parents will name their children after me for warning them to stay the hell away from a movie that scored ZERO PERCENT on RottenTomatoes.com's Tomato Meter.

I speak now not only to my current readers but also to little Michael Clear Nussbaum in the year 2030 who's writing a school report about me and needs more than just the Witless Protection article to work with. Therefore, I will now make the case for why you all should never, ever see College Road Trip.

This won't be as easy a call like Witless was. Movies can surprise you in ways that are very...um...surprising.* I can remember seeing the trailer for Pulp Fiction and thinking it was going to be something like what retarded people would make if they ever broke into a movie studio and shot their own picture. Instead, it turned out to be on of the 20th century's great movies. On the other hand, I thought Snakes On A Plane would be a highly entertaining action film and it was instead fiercely mediocre.

So, why do I think that College Road Trip won't be one of these surprises? Let's review the evidence.

First, there's the trailer. Yeah yeah, I know I just talked about how much I didn't like Pulp Fiction's trailer but that was a complex tapestry of a film. A trailer takes some of the movie's best moments and splices them together and Pulp Fiction's best moments were difficult to appreciate when taken out of context from the rest of the film. Go ahead and watch College road Trip's trailer and see if you think that's the case here:



What did we see? First, we see that Martin Lawrence plays a mind bogglingly stupid police chief with some sort of pig phobia who seems shocked that his 18 year old daughter would want to go to college far away instead of what I assume whatever sort of agricultural community college that his small town offers. He's one of these TV/movie dads who's so insanely overprotective of his teenage daughter's virtue that he thinks it's a good idea to abuse the power of his office by tasing a young man who tries to get her a drink. Apparently he's not brought up on charges or sued since he's still driving his police vehicle when he decides to piss his daughter off by accompanying her on a series of college tours or, more specifically a (drumroll) COLLEGE ROAD TRIP. This is the point at which hilarity has supposedly been procured and the film makers attempt to set it free so that it may ensue. Unfortunately, hilarity is an unpredictable beast and in this case it not only fails to ensue but actually desues. My spell checker just told me that "desues" is not a word but, thanks to me, it will be commonly used by my fans in 2030.

Continuing with the trailer, apparently Lawrence's character has never before spent any sort of extended length of time with another human being since he thinks that playing I Spy and singing Bingo will be sufficient to keep the daughter who already resents him for coming along on this trip entertained. After acting like an ass and rolling his SUV down a hill, he and his daughter as well as his son and their pet pig (don't know how the hell they got there, don't care) bum a ride with a man played by Donny Osmond who provides the only laugh in the entire trailer. Lawrence's character possesses no self awareness since he is now visibly annoyed by Osmond's dull attempts at keeping them entertained even though it's similar to what he trying to do with his daughter.

At this point his character is revealed as either schizophrenic or manic depressive since he suddenly does a complete character reversal and whole-heartedly embraces his daughter's decision to move away and go to an out of town college. Since fucking things up and acting like an ass seems to be the only way Lawrence does things, he rushes them both onto a plane to meet what I suppose is some sort of fast-approaching deadline for either a college interview or some sort of submission filing and OH WHO GIVES A CRAP because it's unimportant to the fact that the plane they're on belongs to a skydiving club and they must now jump out of the plane to do whatever the hell it is they have to do. I guess they make it but it turns out that the girl will be staying the night at some sort of a sorority house so Lawrence reverts to his Totally Bugfuck Insane Dad personality who thinks it's a good idea to hide under the beds of strange college girls. Again, the sins he committed earlier in the movie are visited upon him when one of the sorority girls sees the strange, middle aged man hiding in the sorority house and hits him with a taser.

And, well, that's the trailer. It's my main piece of evidence but I do have more. For instance, we have the video diaries that you can see here and here. The first one shows some of the stunts where you get to see a scene not in the trailer where, after parachuting out of the plane, they steal a golf cart which they seem compelled to drive through crowds of people instead of just going to their destination. In the second one, you see some of the supporting cast making lame jokes capped off by Martin Lawrence making a lame joke about doing a sequel.

My final piece of evidence is Martin Lawrence himself. Lawrence simply doesn't make good movies. Looking through his IMDB profile, the only one I'd even come close to recommending is Bad Boys and that is because it's not a Martin Lawrence movie but rather a movie with Martin Lawrence in it. This is the same distinction I made when discussing Larry the Cable Guy and why the only decent movie Larry had been in was Cars. I admit to never having seen Big Momma's House 2 so, hell, maybe that's Lawrence's Citizen Kane and won't be truly appreciated until after he's dead.

So, that's about it. We'll all see on March 7 if I was right. If I'm wrong then I pretty much blow to hell any chance of the future getting cluttered up with all those monuments to me. I have a decent shot of still being alive in 2030 so, if you see an old man walking around with the self satisfied smile that says he did his part to make humanity a better place, that's probably me. Don't say hi though or I'll hit you with my cane.


*(Note to little M.C. Nussbaum in 2030: What I just wrote is a horribly written sentence and you should never write like that. I could go back and change but, here in 2008, we're taught not to acknowledge or correct our mistakes but, rather, to "stay the course" so that sentence stays in. Oh, and don't do drugs.)