Greg Mottola’s follow up to Superbad shares little in common with that previous film, which isn’t a bad thing as this is an honest and sometimes sweet coming of age tale for a fresh college grad.
James has a plan. As his graduation present his parents are supposed to help fund his trip to Europe with friends, where he can finally lose his virginity, and then he will move to New York to attend an Ivy League school for graduate degree and everything will be peachy. Well upon graduation he discovers that his dad has been demoted and his parents can no longer float him along any more and that he must get a summer job. The only place that will hire him is the local dead end amusement park, Adventureland. James is stuck working the game booths for the course of the summer in which he meets a number of interesting individual, the most interesting being a cute fellow twenty something named Em. James and Em click and they begin hanging out quite a bit and eventually fall into a sort of pseudo relationship of sorts. Meanwhile, James bonds with Joel, a dorky fellow games worker and Connell the parks repair man who is also a fairly successful musician on the side, or so they say. As the summer goes on, we get to see the ups and downs of James and Em, James struggles with his affinity to fall in love, the comings and goings of the park, and the challenge of fighting his urge to get laid over his faithfulness to a relationship.
The film is being sold as a comedy, but dramedy is a far more appropriate label for the film. There are plenty of funny scenes throughout, but this film is more of a look into the life of a down and out twenty something who has yet to really mature in the realm of love. We follow James’ trials and tribulations as he tries to figure out not only his love life, but where his life is going in general, with some shenanigans thrown in for good measure. Em also gets a chunk of the story as well, and she is kind of on the same path as James, lost in her pursuit of finding another while trying to find stable ground at home as the household has changed drastically since the death of her mother.
This might all sound like a bit of a downer, but the film remains fairly upbeat, outside of the act two to three “twist” where every film seems to conventionally try and split up our main characters. The film moves along at a nice and easy pace and is never boring, and almost always pretty smart and interesting. A couple members of the cast could have used a bit more fleshing out, and there are a few useless characters that might get a bit to much, but the story is really James’ and a bit too Em. The film also opens a couple doors that had potential to supply a lot of interesting material and intrigue for characters but sadly uses them for the sake of plot. Connell and Lisa P both could have supplied a lot more to the story I feel and it’s a shame we didn’t get more of them. Also, the film tries to make something of Joel, James co-worker buddy, but Mottola never really figures out a way to really get the most out of the character and we are left with a couple of scenes that feel in complete and odd surrounding him; oh well, didn’t destroy the film or anything.
The actors in the film all do a nice job, with Jesse Eisenberg doing some good work as James, though he seems like a bit more grown up and mature version of his character in The Squid and the Whale. Kristen Stewart is successful as a bit of an angst driven, intelligent and laid back girlfriend, but she also doesn’t seem to be doing anything that different then her character in Twilight either; but I still like her in what she has been doing as of late. Martin Starr as Joel supplies a couple of good lines, but like I mentioned his character kind of gets lost, and Starr doesn’t get much else to do in the picture, even though they tried to. Ryan Reynolds is likeable as always as Connell and our stigma about Reynolds usual role helps play to the arc of his character and not seeing a couple things coming with him. Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader are the stand outs as the park owners though, bring the laughs every time they are on the screen, one only wishes there was more of them in the picture though, as a number of the hijinks on the Adventureland site don’t involve them and it should. Margarita Levieva also nails the, ‘I’m hot shit’ shtick and I think we could have dived into her character more.
In the end, Adventureland is one of the better attempts at a coming of age story in the last couple years. Is it the best of the bunch, no, there are too many little blunders dotted throughout the film that hold it back. But nonetheless, it is an entertaining and engaging dramedy that is a semi-successful character study of a fresh college grad that is lost in the world. Only if Mottola would have been able to pin down exactly what stories he wanted to focus on outside of James’ then parts of the film would have felt a little deeper and less scattershot making the film a more cohesive film, but it still entertains as is so I guess he did alright.
It gets a B-