Also Up a Creek

As we’ve slowly been going through the various road trip sex comedies of the early 2000s (see also Road Trip, EuroTrip), we come to some of the really forgotten films of this sub-genre. It’s interesting to see the evolution of this form, as this spurt of comedies (no pun intended) was started by the release of American Pie, which showed there was life in the teen sex comedy genre. Other studios tried to get their own franchises off the ground (again, see Dreamworks’ Road Trip) and that led to a quick saturation of sex comedies for teens and college students. And then, within the next half decade, the genre quickly sputtered out.

EuroTrip in 2004 was a very funny movie that audiences didn’t turn up for (probably because Stifler wasn’t in it), and then you had films like Without a Paddle which kept the road trip structure (that Road Trip added into the mix) and ditched the teen sex part. You can see why the studio went this route: a teen sex comedy implies sex, and that means an R rating, so less people can show up at the theaters to watch the film. If you remove (almost) all the nudity and (almost) all the swearing you can have a comedy in the same vein, but the under 17 crowd can show up as well.

In a way this gambit worked. Made on a budget of $19 Mil, Without a Paddle managed to recoup $73 Mil at the Box Office, making it a small, but not negligible, hit. Paramount Pictures got back more money than they put in, the three likable stars – Seth Green, Matthew Lillard, and Dax Shepard – all had a hit for their filmography, and audiences… well, actually they were the losers of this enterprise. The film is a watered down, less outrageous, less interesting riff on the genre, and that means less laughs even if the studio also got something safer for the kiddies. In a mercenary way it might have worked, but the lack of laughs or quality meant that once it was done in theaters, Without a Paddle was all but forgotten by everyone that saw it.

The film focuses on three long time friends who all grew up together. Dan Mott (Seth Green) is a doctor with a successful practice, but he's also a total doormat. Jerry Conlaine (Matthew Lillard) is a disaffected office drone that would rather spend his days surfing than working, and he's losing his connection with his long time girlfriend. And Tom Marshall (Dax Shepard) is a down-on-his-luck guy that can get all the women, but can't pay his bills or keep his life together. After years apart they all get back together when their fourth friend, Billy Newwood (Antony Starr), dies.

Reminiscing about the good old days, the three remaining friends go to their old tree fort and find all their old treasures. One of those treasures is a map, a treasure map Billy had been working on for years, searching for D.B. Cooper’s landing site. Cooper famously fled a plane with a massive bag full of money, and then was never seen again, and Billy thought he’d finally tracked where Cooper could have landed. Deciding to honor their dead friend, the three guys rent a canoe, pack it with food and beer, and head off to follow the trail Billy left them and find Cooper’s treasure. Of course, nothing will go according to plan…

You can kind of see the bones of what Without a Paddle was going for when you watch the film. It wants to be equal parts The Goonies and Road Trip. It nods towards the wonder of childhood, when you thought any treasure map would be interesting, while also trying to follow the formula of guys on the road (or, in this case, the river) finding one awkward adventure after another, occasionally with some female skin included. In the right hands I think this film could have at least been amusingly fun, but Without a Paddle wasn’t put into the right hands.

The film was helmed by Steven Brill, who has made a lot of terrible movies during the span of his career. His biggest success was as a writer, when he penned all three Mighty Ducks films. Since switching to the director’s chair, though, he’s had one middling-to-bad project after another. He had one major success as a director, helming Adam Sandler’s Mr. Deeds, and since then he’s made many of Sandler’s less successful films while also helming even bigger disasters without his main star as well. Considering his body of work, Without a Paddle, with its low-stakes adventure and weak-sauce comedy, fits right in.

The big issue with the film is that it doesn’t really try. This is a film about guys going down the river, looking for an adventure, and while they technically stumble into one – they piss off two redneck pot growers, Elwood (Ethan Suplee) and Dennis (Abraham Benrubi), who kind of chase them around the mountain when the film isn’t distracted by other things going on – the film takes a very hands-off, low-energy approach to the adventure. There’s rarely any moments of action, very few times where the film convincingly goes silly, and none of its desperate elements work well together.

One of the biggest issues with the film is that it’s a sex comedy without any sex. Three dudes hitting the road for adventure is a prime setup for ribald adventure (once again, see Road Trip), but the film never really knows what to do with it. The film has all its edges saddened off to make it safe and bankable, leading to an adventure that doesn’t feel funny or outrageous, but more like a live-action cartoon. This film could be animated and it would. Feel about the same, and that’s not a compliment for the storytelling of this movie.

It doesn’t help that the film really doesn’t know what to do with the few comedic set-pieces it tries to set up. At one point Seth Green’s Dan is captured by a bear because she thinks he’s a bear cub. The why or how of this isn’t explored, but almost as soon as she takes him, his friends track him down and he escapes almost instantly after. The sequence where the guys stumble on the rednecks and their pot farm has a few lazy jokes about pot smoked (and stoned dogs) but there aren’t any real punchlines and they escape almost as quickly as they get there. They meet some ladies who live the au naturel life in a tree house, and the film makes fun of them for being hippies but it can’t really find any laughs from the setup. And then, in a great tragedy, they get Burt Reynolds to show up as a man living out in the woods for thirty years (you know, from about the time Burt starred in Deliverance) and even then it can’t find anything funny to do with him. I complained about Scary Movie feeling like anti-comedy, but this film might, in many ways, be worse since I don’t even think Without a Paddle understands what comedy really is.

About the only thing the film gets right is finding three likable actors to play three reasonably likable guys. Too often we see a cast of creeps in sex comedies, but these guys are decent humans. Flawed, sure, and not at all certain how to be adults despite their ages (they’re all in their early thirties), but they aren’t bad guys. They don’t do anything illegal, they don’t molest or drug anyone (or stream their nudity without consent). And while sure there are some gay jokes they make that aren’t really necessary, they are, on the whole, better than most protagonists in these kinds of films.

I just can’t help but wish someone more competent had directed this film. Brill does a very workman-like direction job on the film, making it seem pretty low-rent and bland, but a better director, with funnier ideas, could have made a comedy that was actually comedic. Without a Paddle tries, but fails, and I want to commend the film for trying, I can see why no one talks about this movie anymore. It’s as bland as they come.