The runaway commercial success of 1998’s There’s Something About Mary and, the following year, American Pie, gave filmmakers and studio executives the creative license to shoehorn into R-rated comedies every gross-out gag involving saggy appendages and bodily fluids that could be conceived, no matter how convoluted the set-up. Misapplying the lessons of the aforementioned films — their tonal balance of, ahem, salty and sweet — teen movies for several years afterward became mostly just slapdash races toward forced outrageousness. Not so with Sex Drive, which may be the most reliably funny teen sex comedy since the original American Pie, and is certainly the most amiable, lived-in and casually self-assured film of its type in that time.



Lanky high school senior Ian Lafferty (Josh Zuckerman, above center) can’t seem to catch a break. Regularly humiliated by his job at a mall donut shop, he’s habitually shown up in the romance department by his younger brother and mercilessly taunted by his older brother Rex (James Marsden), who warns that his lack of a girlfriend may be a sign that he’s “getting gay.”

Actually, Ian has a crush: his longtime best friend Felicia (Amanda Crew, above left). Unable to make her see him as more than a friend, though, Ian engages in some heavy cyber-flirting, and hooks up with an out-of-town babe who seemingly can’t wait to get busy. Egged on by his wry, devil-may-care pal Lance (Clark Duke, above right), Ian “borrows” his brother’s prized vintage Pontiac GTO and, with Lance and an unwitting Felicia in tow, hits the road on a mission to lose his virginity. Car problems, a roadside carnival, trouble with the law, and encounters with both an Amish farmer (Seth Green) and some Amish youth-gone-wild all complicate the group’s journey.

Casting can totally make or break a free-spirited romp like this, and in Zuckerman, Crew and Duke, Sex Drive has a winning hat trick of fresh young faces. Marsden, meanwhile, continues his unlikely reinvention as a comedic player of consequence. Fresh off funny, engaging turns of different sorts in Hairspray, Enchanted and 27 Dresses, he plays frost-tipped Rex with a manic, swallowed rage that plenty of terrorized younger siblings will wincingly recognize.

Co-written by John Morris and director Sean Anders, the movie has an unusual source material pedigree (Andy Behrens’ book All the Way) for a teen flick, and it’s perhaps this fact that helps give it both a solid foundation and a forward-leaning energy all its own. There are broad moments, yes, but they’re both funny and well-integrated with the sort of muttered asides and comedy of self-negation that give one a deeper sense of identification with the characters.

A few of the characterizations seem to borrow a bit from other movies (Duke spins a variation on the zen sex master that Eddie Kaye Thomas did in American Pie), but Sex Drive also nails (no pun intended) the jumbled, hormonal fog of adolescence, when it was possible to pine, both strongly and blindly, for multiple people right in front of your eyes. And it does so by being gross only occasionally, when it actually fits the story. (Summit Entertainment, R, 105 minutes)