Review of Project X (2012) by Filipeneto — 23 Aug 2020

Teen films have the gift of pushing absurdity to the limit, and this film is perfect for exemplifying it. Presenting itself as a "found footage", it shows how a college birthday party, initially thought for some friends, gets out of control when it is massively advertised, taking almost two thousand young people thirsty for alcohol, noise and sex to a suburban house, where adults are conveniently absent. What follows is, pure and simple, all sorts of crazy things that can be imagined at a party, and a trail of destruction and chaos that seems to worry no one.

I think I have already shown, by other reviews that I have written, that I am not a fan of this kind of film and I think that they have nothing artistic or comic. This film broke all, or almost all, of the stupidity records by making the case for madness and drunkenness. But the worst of all was to see, in the ending, with the neighborhood half burned and that house totally destroyed, the face of that father who, while pulling his own car out of a pool, proved to be unable to give his son a real lesson, showing even a hint of pride! Pride in what? That brat gathered a crowd of Huns, they destroyed the house, all the houses around, everything! That father will live the rest of his life stuck in debts, will see his son plunged in lawsuits, surely happy to not be arrested for years, as he deserved! Pride in what? If a son of mine did a finger of what that idiot kid did, I would make him work hard to pay the losses and ground him until the next century! Education starts at home, with rules and limits. And this film is the glorification of the absence of limits. Then the teenagers start to find all of this very cool and to imitate it... don't say it isn't true.

The film is just bad, sad and depressing. It's not funny, it exudes amateurism from every pore and is simply stupid in its essence. In addition, and from everything I've said about how wrong the concept of this film is, it's all highly unbelievable. You can't believe that more than a thousand people drank and used drugs without thinking about what was happening around them. Someone would have stopped all that madness because teenagers are not all like that and there are many who prefer to abstain from excesses. And it is not possible to believe that, in the whole neighborhood, only one neighbor would revolt with all that, or that the police would be so lenient. It is simply too fake and artificial to be credible. And it may not be worth talking about the cliché characters, made up of one-dimensional stereotypes, and the cast of amateurs, made up of the worst students in drama schools.

Excessive, unbelievable, brutally stupid and painfully artificial, this film is of no use. It will only serve for teenagers to try to imitate, on a very small scale. Therefore, all copies of the film should simply be burned.