Drunk Bus

In the beginning of Drunk Bus, a film "inspired by real shit," the audience is notified that the story takes place in 2006 (winter, based on the omnipresent snow and winter coats), which was noteworthy for me because I would have been a university freshman or sophomore in the winter of 2006. I also routinely took the campus buses, which were free for students. The driver of the bus in this film is named Michael, a young man played by Charlie Tahan, sporting a winter beanie lots of university students wore then (and now, I assume). Michael, one can tell immediately, hates his job. How could he not? University students are constantly drunk on his bus, after all. 

I had a variety of jobs as a student at Kent State University. Some of them I loved (writing movie reviews for the Daily Kent Stater), some of them I liked (being a waiter or a Resident Assistant), and some of them I hated (being a telemarketer for the university). I never drove a bus, but Michael says out loud that other than nude modeling (another job I didn't do), it's the highest-paying job on campus (a fact confirmed by co-director Brandon LaGanke, another KSU alumnus). 

While I wasn't a bus driver like Michael is, I was thrilled to see the film take place in Kent (though the college is called Kent Institute of Technology), bringing about a rush of memories immediately spinning in my head. As Michael's bus pulled up to a curmudgeonly man with a long white beard, I wondered to myself if this character (whom Michael pleads with to get on the bus) was based on local Kent legend Fuck You Bob. Indeed, it was. He's even called that in the film. For the record, the "hippie-looking" Fuck You Bob was a local artist named Robert Wood, who died in 2012. He was "flippant," to put it mildly, even being told by police in 1992 that he could not enter KSU's campus anymore. Now the world of indie-loving cinephiles can know that such a man truly existed.

However, my initial delight and all the wonderful nostalgia soon evaporated. Nobody likes obnoxious drunk students, but no one does (or should) like movies that glamorize them in the name of empathy. But obnoxiousness is only one edge of this sword. The other in Drunk Bus is a smorgasbord of toilet humor; the movie is completely saturated in it. When the bathroom humor does't work, then we get a lot of screaming and yelling in attempted shots for laughs, whether it's from drunk students being drunk students or someone having an orgasm. It's not funny, either. And when that doesn't work, then we get morbid humor, which is only a step above toilet humor if there were some kind of Bloom-inspired hierarchy of producing comedy. It's frustrating that a film so painfully unfunny has received such acclaimed, and yet it has. As of this writing, it is number twenty-six on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the one-hundred best films of 2021. Yet it's undoubtedly one of the least funny films I've seen in a long, long time. 

Most of the reasons why the film doesn't work as a comedy (beyond its fetish for toilet humor) is that so many of its characters are not interesting or redeemable in the slightest. University-level students aren't always the most likable people in the world, but few of them are as unpleasant as the majority of these characters. Within twenty minutes of Drunk Bus, I found myself caring less and less about any of them or any situation they found themselves in. Halfway through the film, I just wanted the whole thing to be over. It's a particular pity that Will Forte, who plays the sophomoric middle-aged boss who peaked a little too early and now manages Michael and the other bus drivers, tormenting them with flatulence, is spending a lot of his career making overrated garbage like this and the overrated Netflix series Sweet Tooth. 

One character and actor who at least is compelling enough is Pineapple Tangaroa, playing a fictional version of himself. (Tangaroa, a bald Samoan man with tattoos all over his face, was a university friend of LaGanke's.) In the film, Pineapple is hired by the bus company to be security to assist Michael with the unruly drunkards each night. Pineapple's intimidating presence and almost mystic wisdom immediately have effects, with Michael being guided along the way as he learns to stand up to jerks and maybe even lose his virginity. Michael is under a lot of pressure, though, and soon there are fissures in their friendship. They even get into a shouting match, and terrible words are exchanged between them. That's basically the stakes in the film: characters lie to each other, characters hurt each other, and it goes round and round, just like Michael on his constant bus loops. It may work for some, but it didn't for me. 

A big problem I have with Drunk Bus is its hubris. If you were to sit down LaGanke, co-director John Carlucci, and screenwriter Chris Molinaro, and then accuse their Drunk Bus of simply being a movie of the likes of Road Trip, the 2000 road trip sex comedy starring Breckin Meyer and Tom Green, or National Lampoon's Van Wilder, the 2002 college comedy with Ryan Reynolds, they might be offended. Those films, which LaGanke, Carlucci, and Molinaro surely saw when they were younger, clearly influenced Drunk Bus, whether they want to admit it or not. But Drunk Bus isn't Road Trip or Van Wilder, we would be told. It's about...I don't know. Life or youth or friendship or something artsy that the three would clumsily spit out. It wouldn't be a convincing argument. Drunk Bus thinks it's like The Perks of Being a Wall Flower, a coming-of-age tale of young people, but it's definitely more of a Road Trip, a dumb comedy. This one just happens to take place in a bus on the same route, night after night, with copious amounts of sound, fury, and weak attempts at humor all being flushed down a toilet.