THE REAL CANCUN(R)
1/2 (out of 5)
April 25, 2003
STARRING
A Bunch of No-Name Spring Breakers
Directed by: Rick De Oliveira
BY KEVIN CARR
The premise is simple: “The Real World” goes to Cancun. Sixteen college-aged kids (you can’t even say college students because a handful of the housemates don’t even attend college) are given an all-expense paid trip to Cancun for spring break and filmed 24-hours a day. In short, this is a film about all the people I hated in college.
It is films like this that make me think that if Mexico suddenly went to war with a superpower, and the Cancun area was nuked into oblivion during a spring break weekend that the world might actually be a better place.
You have Laura, the self proclaimed wild girl from Wisconsin who hops into bed with Jeremy, the first housemate that shows her any affection. To her shock and awe, Jeremy blows her off after their night of passion. This infuriates her, turning her into a psycho ex-girlfriend stalker when he brings home other busty blondes from the Cancun night clubs. Jeremy is the pretty boy marketing major whose obvious goal of the week is to bed as many blondes as possible. He does win the tally with three, and yes, he is very good looking. But he’s an uber-creep. His brief affair with Laura causes grief in the house, leading one to believe the saying that people simply get what they deserve.
You have Sky, the token black girl with a booty that puts J-Lo’s to shame. She’s hot, and she knows it. During her audition tape, she admits proudly that she wants a guy she can play mind games with. However, when housemate Paul plays the game right back at her, she blows up and acts as if he violated her.
You have David and Heidi, the obligatory best friends since age six who never got it on. Of course, it is painfully apparent that David would like to get it on with Heidi, but she’s the typical cute girl who has a male friend to use as an emotional tampon when her other jerk boyfriends dump on her.
You have Nicole and Roxanne, attractive twins who have voices more annoying than Jennifer Tilly. At first, they appear to be somewhat prudish when asked in their audition if they were okay with nudity. They turn up their nose at it, especially when it comes to seeing each other in their birthday suits. However, once in Cancun, they have no problem stripping down to their panties during a wet T-shirt contest, bumping and grinding on each other like Las Vegas showgirls.
You have the token prude, a scrawny loser named Alan. Not only is he a proud non-drinker (who too-easily buckles like a belt under some peer pressure and tequila), but he’s also a Darwinian virgin. In other words, he so repels women – even to the point of running away like a French platoon when a friendly co-ed approaches him for a chance to skinny dip in the Gulf – that the invisible hand of evolution won’t allow him to have sex with anyone without paying for it first. By the end of the week, he makes friends of the other dregs of humanity in this house, but it is apparent that he will return home with a false sense of coolness, grow old alone with a only a stack of pornography to keep him company, and eventually snap one day at work and take out everyone in a mall food court with an AK-47.
You have Casey, the male model with a “Zoolander” IQ who keeps begging girls to make out with him in the style of Adam Sandler in “Billy Madison.” If he wasn’t so good looking, he’d almost be as pathetic as Alan.
And finally, you have the queen of the mind-screwing, boyfriend cheating, one-step-from-hooker women of the house – Sarah. She has a boyfriend back in Las Vegas whom she complains about in her audition tape, desperately wishing they would break up because she feels like they’re married already. When she gets to Cancun, she zeroes in on spoiled brat Matt who has never had to work a day in his life because his mother pays for everything from rent to credit card bills. She leads him on for the whole week, refusing to sleep with him because she has a boyfriend (how romantic!). When he brings home a hot blonde on the last night, Sarah confronts the couple in the shower and blows up at Matt, telling him that he could have had her if only he had waiting another 24 hours. This is a girl who has a long life of divorce and Jerry Springer appearances in front of her. When she loses her looks in her mid-30s, she’s truly going to find herself in the “real” world.
The rest of the sixteen housemates are so pathetically boring that they are lost in the entire movie. And to say that you are less interesting than slutty Laura or dorky Alan is enough to entice these forgotten housemates to take a nose dive off the Sears tower when they get home.
To round out the film, what hedonistic, sexually degrading romp on the big screen would be complete without an appearance by Snoop Dogg. After all, we all know what a bastion of morality and virtue this alleged murderer and drug user is.
For a deeper look into these characters’ vacuous lives, check out their profiles on the web site www.therealcancun.com. The most terrifying thing on there is the responses of these future leaders to the questions, “What is your favorite book?” Responses range from children’s books (obviously the last thing they read in 4th grade) like Matt’s “Charlotte’s Web” to cartoon books like Alan’s “Anything with Calvin and Hobbes ” and forgettable Brittany’s “National Lampoon’s Truly Tasteless and Sick Cartoons.” At least Laura’s response was an honest, “I don’t really read.”
For the guys out there thinking that at least you’ll get to see some nudity in this film, don’t bother. While sexual innuendo and vulgar language abound as much as they do on “The Real World” and “Road Rules,” there is shockingly little nudity (which many of the cast leads us to believe would be their only redeeming quality). If you want to see hot young co-eds getting drunk and flashing their breasts to the camera, you’d be better off spending your money on the latest “Girls Gone Wild” video.
“The Real Cancun” is an exercise in bad taste that glorifies promiscuous sex, excessive drinking, womanizing, the virtues of peer pressure and your basic disrespect for humanity. Hopefully this film bombs, or more excruciating reality-television-turned-feature-films will be inflicted upon America. If this film performs only one-tenth as well as the other MTV-inspired video pseudo-documentary “Jackass,” then Armageddon is truly upon us.
At least “Jackass” was funny.