Unofficially, National Lampoon's Van Wilder is Son of Animal House. Officially, it is twice as bestial but half as funny.
Comment
04/04/02
National Lampoon's Van Wilder (2002)
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Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:86
Fresh:16
Rotten:70
Average Rating:3.5/10
Consensus: A derivative gross-out comedy that's short on laughs.
Reviews for National Lampoon's Van Wilder
When it comes to collegiate humor, nobody goes lowbrow like our friends at the Lampoon.
04/04/02
What's lacking is the sense of structure that might have made Van Wilder more than a meandering succession of random gags.
04/04/02
Top CriticVan Wilder has a built-in audience, but only among those who are drying out from spring break and are still unconcerned about what they ingest.
04/04/02
When you start giving National Lampoon movies a bad name, you must be doing something really wrong.
04/04/02
Top CriticThe only thing keeping it from being a complete waste of time is the charismatic performance of Mr. Reynolds.
04/04/02
For each chuckle there are at least 10 complete misses, many coming from the amazingly lifelike Tara Reid, whose acting skills are comparable to a cardboard cutout.
04/04/02
The problem is not that it's all derivative, because plenty of funny movies recycle old tropes. The problem is that Van Wilder does little that is actually funny with the material.
04/04/02
Even Vegas Vacation was wise enough to distance itself from the humorists responsible for such comedy landmarks as Loaded Weapon 1, Senior Trip and Golf Punks.
04/04/02
The storyline gets buried by the filmmakers insistence on trying to be cruder than all the other gross-out comedies.
04/04/02
Is there really an army of teenagers out there pining for the cozy old anarchy of Animal House-era high jinks?
04/04/02
When Van Wilder sticks to its wits, its comedy is unstoppable. But...there's an equal (amount) of acute unoriginality and beyond-belief bad taste.
04/04/02
... think of it as American Pie On Valium.
04/03/02
Often silly – and gross – but it’s rarely as moronic as some campus gross-out films.
04/03/02
If you're looking for yet another mindless college flick with a number of laughs and a captivating lead, you can certainly do much worse than this movie
04/02/02
For a film like this to work, the hero must be as charming as he is irrepressible, and Reynolds, star of the ABC series Two Guys and a Girl, fits the bill.
04/01/02
Top CriticIt wanders aimlessly from scene to scene. It has no idea where it's going or where it's been.
04/01/02
[A] painfully flat gross-out comedy ...
03/15/02
Like Slackers, Super Troopers and last year's Wet Hot American Summer, Van Wilder is nostalgic for the gross-out yarns of yesteryear.
02/23/02
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