It's not like I can trash this movie for not being great cinema; it wasn't trying to be. It would be like trashing Charles M. Schultz because Charlie Brown didn't look like Chagall had painted him. Of course, I can trash this film for not being what it was supposed to be, which was a comedy. It had funny parts, but too many of the jokes fell flat, and it made the huge mistake of making the supporting, even marginal, characters a heck of a lot more interesting than the leads.

The plot, which is an excuse to set up some of the jokes like in all films like this, is that a trio of friends, Josh (Breckin Meyer), E.L. (Seann William Scott), and Rubin (Paul Costanzo), go on a road trip to prevent Josh's girlfriend Tiffany (Rachel Blanchard) from receiving a videotape of him having sex with another girl, Beth (Amy Smart). They enlist the help of super-nerd Kyle (DJ Qualls) and his car. Along the way, they encounter various funny and unfunny situations: a night at an all-black fraternity house, the theft of a bus from a school for the blind, and an encounter with a disgruntled waiter. Meanwhile, Kyle's dad hunts them down because he is overprotective.

There are indeed funny sequences, but the fatal flaw is that most of them don't involve the principals. The movie's laughs are stolen by Tom Green and Andy Dick, veteran MTV personalities who can be funny in the right doses. Green's obsession with the feeding of Rubin's pet python is priceless, as is Andy Dick's harangue of Rubin when asked if he knows where the travelers can get any pot. But therein lies another problem: the film's miniscule plot requires what is essentially unrelated padding—Tom Green's segments have nothing to do with the film except to grant it length, some admittedly funny moments, and the requisite nudity (especially in the unrated version).

Those minor parts were played by actors who have enough of their own personalities to survive the clunky plot and half-hearted toilet humor. The leads were earnest enough, but they weren't funny. Of course, neither was much of the material they were given