Adventureland: Good, Bad, or simply Misunderstood?

by Matt Sokol

Over vacation, I decided to take an adventure to a local movie theater and see the new film Adventureland. While expecting to see a comedy about a bad summer job and the experiences it creates, instead I sat through a great disappointment.

Set in the late 80’s, Adventureland follows the summer of James Brennen just after he graduates from college. James is a dull, socially awkward nerd who is preparing to attend to Columbia’s graduate school of journalism. However, after his father looses his job, James needs to acquire a summer job working at an amusement park called Advnetureland in order to get needed money for school.

While the premise sets the film up as a wacky bildungromans filled with wild and crazy events produced by just crazy characters, the audience is only let down when the “ride” gets going.

One of the greatest problems with the film is that it is filled with unoriginal stock characters. Although the characters all appear different, they all share a certain dullness. As the film focuses on these bland incarnations, it fails to develop the more interesting people inhabiting this theme park. For example take Joel. Joel is perhaps the smartest and most interesting character in the movie. He majors in Russian Literature and Slavic languages, rocks the “I just begin to grow facial hair” mustache, smokes a pipe, and operates a rigged game booth. However, Joel never becomes the supporting character that he should be and serves only as a secondary character amongst to all the other secondary characters. The film could have done some much more to develop Joel and incorporate his “quirkiness” into the film, but instead did nothing.

Another problem is that A running theme of the film is conflicts between lovers, however, many of the relationships are those we have seen in other films: there is the guy who wants to be with a girl but can’t because she is with another guy, and then there is this mighty attractive girl that every guy wants, but only James, being the adorable nerd can get, and then.... The film just recycled old ideas into a new setting.

Lastly, (Well not really lastly because I could keep going) the film advertised itself as a comedy about a horrible job, but the job itself was a pretty typical minimum wage job that wasn’t really funny. Is there supposed to be an irony that an overqualified undergrad student is working at a games booth? In truth Most of the film’s comedy is derived from James’s getting hit in the nether regions and getting “excited” at inappropriate times.
This puerile humor fails to make the film worth seeing.

Overall, it wasn’t very funny and didn’t have any really purpose.