On one level, this is a really horrible movie that tries to make heroes out of slackers, potheads and social rejects, but on another more subliminal level, the kids in this movie are like the largest comedy team ever seen. They're not funny, they're interesting to watch. Jeremy Renner is the ringleader, an under-achiever who has accepted his limitations and blindly corrupts logic to break the rules. He should have been a break out star, but the direction doesn't explore his comedic chops and he is forced to mug, grimace and cow tow to the rest of the cast. The true funny presence to watch is character-actor Kevin MacDonald as the psycho Trekkie with a chip on his shoulder who wants to takeout Renner's character for years of psychological abuse; he's the one to watch here as he goes through abuse after abuse and realizes the things he learned from "Star Trek" don't help him in the real world. Matt Frewer is wasted as an exasperated, harried and frustrated principal stuck in one mode as the kids push him over the end; he's pretty much the kids patsy and victim from one end of the movie to the other. Eric Edwards plays a forced Belushi clone: an sleepy yet vice-driven imbecile without morals, but without any of the charm, humor or presence of John or Jim Belushi. (To see him now, you'd never expect he was the same actor!) Tommy Chong is stuck in the same one-joke cliché role he plays in every movie: a conspiracy-talking pothead who is his own worst enemy. It's a shame he's written off so early; investigating his life would have been more interesting. My favorite character is Carla Morgan played by Tara Charendoff; she oozes sex and kittenishly moves through the movie possessed by Marilyn Monroe showing off the full range of her acting ability. The plot is weak; it runs like a documentary of high school rejects attached to a loose sequence of comedic criminal events and unfunny disasters filled with a huge cast of unknowns. Only Charendoff and Nicole DeBoer would go on to any greater success. It lacks the spirit of "Animal House," the humor of John Landis or the commentary of Harold Ramis, and yet, you wonder what sort of damage these kids could do somewhere else and there, there is the one saving point of this film that you wonder what happens to them next.
Review of National Lampoon's Senior Trip
