Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Mort Nathan
Cast :
Kal Penn”¦”¦”¦.Taj
Lauren Cohan”¦”¦”¦.Charlotte Higginson
Daniel Percival”¦”¦”¦.Pipp Everett, the Earl of Grey
National Lampoon’s Van Wilder is considered by some as perhaps the worst teen comedy ever as well as one of the worst sins ever committed to celluloid. With a $5 million budget, the film’s $38 million worldwide box office would make the film a remarkable success, at least from a commercial standpoint. Remarkable enough to warrant a sequel, though this time around Ryan Reynolds is nowhere to be found, as Van’s protégé Taj (Kal Penn) is given a film of his own in National Lampoon’s Van Wilder II: The Rise of Taj.
Penn returns to the role that helped give him a career as the plucky Pakistani who wants to sleep with as many women as possible. This time around he’s graduated from college and is in pursuit of a graduate degree in history at England’s Camford College. Denied entry into the secret society that his father was in, Taj bonds with a group of rejects and leads them in a battle for the university’s Hastings Cup. Battling the usual sort of teen comedy villiain in Pipp (Daniel Percival) and being entangled in a love triangle with his girlfriend Charlotte (Lauren Cohan), Taj is in for a clash of cultures in the United Kingdom. But, more importantly, the film actually shows some level of improvement over the first. Instead of being outright awful, Van Wilder II ascends to the heights of just plain bad.
Anything, it seems, would be an improvement over the first film in the series but it’s not as if the sequel has some sort of comic genius attached to it. The film tries to be racy but the sort of teen sex romp that was in style four years ago, when Van Wilder was on the big screen, has died a rapid death and the sort of territory the film tries to cross is almost passé at this moment. It’s been done before and been done better; Van Wilder II finds the exact type of humor, if not many of the same exact jokes, that the original was based on. While the film is going to be derivative of the first, outright theft of material from the first seems a bit non-sensical at this point.
Especially considering that Penn is actually quite funny in the film, Van Wilder II is a disappointment. The material is horrible, as this is not a well-written film in any respect, but Penn really tries hard to make the film funny. Taj isn’t a character that’s written well enough for anyone to root for, nor is anyone else really, but Penn works hard to make Taj a good underdog. He brings some life into an otherwise dreary, paint by numbers comedy.
And that’s ultimately how Van Wilder II turns out to be: dreary. For all the scenery of England and all the potential material rife for comedy, the film turns down some great potential for the same cliché jokes about dog semen that made National Lampoon’s Van Wilder such a “delightful” film.
