Road Trip (2000)
★★★★ — Road Trip (2000)
There's a scene in Road Trip involving a tiny salmon swimming upstream that I still, to this day, find myself randomly singing out loud. No context. No warning. Just the song appearing in my brain while I'm doing the washing up or waiting for a bus. That's the kind of film this is. It buries itself into your skull at exactly the right moment and never fully leaves.
For me, that moment was being about eleven or twelve years old, and Road Trip was precisely the film eleven-year-old me needed. Gross-out gags, chaos, a road trip, lads making terrible decisions. I was absolutely the target audience, and it delivered everything I wanted. Coming back to it now as an adult, I can see it for what it is: dumb. Really, genuinely, proudly dumb. But here's the thing. It's also brilliantly dumb, and that distinction matters more than people give it credit for.
The plot is basically nothing. A videotape ends up in the wrong hands, a road trip ensues, chaos multiplies. That's it. You could write the whole thing on a napkin and still have room left over. But Road Trip isn't asking you to care about story mechanics. It's asking you to surrender to the energy of it, and when you do, it's an absolute blast. This is the kind of comedy that feels like someone bottled the spirit of MTV stunts, prank call culture and late-night Jackass energy and somehow convinced a studio to fund the whole thing. It's chaotic in exactly the right way.
The cast does a huge amount of heavy lifting here. DJ Qualls is genuinely the heart of the film, finding something sweet and real underneath all the mayhem. And Tom Green is operating on a completely different plane of existence from everyone else, doing full absurdist performance art while the rest of the cast tries to keep pace with him. Sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes you watch someone else on screen and think "what on earth is he doing," but that roughness is almost part of the charm. This isn't polished studio filmmaking. It's scrappy, and it knows it.
By any objective measure of craft, it's not a great film. The script is patchy in places, the performances swing wildly in quality, and the whole thing looks like it could've been shot on my cousin's camcorder in a weekend. If you sat me down and asked me to defend it against, say, something like Old School, which came along a few years later and did a lot of the same things with noticeably more polish, I'd struggle. Old School is the tighter film. Road Trip is the funnier memory. Those aren't always the same thing.
What Road Trip has, and what I don't think can be manufactured or written into a script, is charm. There's a genuine looseness to it, a sense that everyone involved is having a ridiculous time and doesn't particularly care if the seams are showing. Early-2000s teen comedies had that quality in spades, and Road Trip might be one of the purest examples of the genre doing exactly what it set out to do, no more, no less.
They really don't make films like this anymore. Partly because the industry has moved on, partly because streaming has changed what gets greenlit, and partly, if we're being honest, because a fair amount of what happens in it would raise eyebrows today. Whether that's a good or bad thing probably depends on your relationship with the era. For me, it mostly makes me nostalgic for a time when comedy was allowed to be genuinely stupid without needing to justify itself.
Four stars. I'm not apologising for it.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2000 | Watched: 2025-05-16
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Todd Phillips: Old School (2003) · Joker (2019)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
