Euro Trip Review
by Andy Keast (arthistoryguy AT aol DOT com)March 8th, 2004
Eurotrip (2004): *** out of ****
Written and directed by Jeff Schaffer, Alec Berg and David Mandel. Starring Scott Mechlowicz, Jacob Pitts, Michelle Trachtenberg and Travis Wester.
by Andy Keast
I went into "Eurotrip" expecting a stupid movie. And it is. It's also good-natured in a naïve and perverted way. The characters aren't the cynical, smug, mean-spirited animals that routinely occupy this genre (see "The Perfect Score"), but earnest innocents who would actually wish you well. The plot exists solely to have a comedy about Americans in Europe, but so what? It's what I call a *clothesline screenplay,* upon which jokes and gags are hung.
Scotty (Scott Mechlowicz) has a German pen-pal named Mike (pronounced "MEE-Kuh," a common German girl's name). They exchange correspondence through email, and as the result of some stupidity by Scotty's friend Cooper (Jacob Pitts), Mike's email blocks his. Two sibling friends of theirs, Jenny and Jamie (Michelle Trachtenberg and Travis Wester), had been planning a trip to Europe already, so they all set out for Germany to help Scotty retrieve the girl.
Yeah…it's thin. The country-hopping makes the script episodic, and some episodes are funnier than others. But that's alright. I enjoy traveling myself and got a kick out of how the movie made fun not of European stereotypes, but of the Americans' invention of them (perverted Italians, Hitler youth, Dutch fetishists, etc.). I thought it was funny how the boys always refer to Trachtenberg as another boy, as if they can't fathom the idea that a girl would want to pal around with them. Wester was a dead-on as the typical paranoid traveler, hiding his passport under his shirt and his money in
his shoes. I also laughed at the movie's joke that the only image Americans have Eastern Europe is of an endless dilapidated housing complex in the middle of nowhere. It was cute.
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