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Plot: A group of teens hit the road in a stolen driver’s ed car, racing against time to help a lovesick high school senior track down his college-freshman girlfriend and win her back. In 24 chaotic hours, they’re chased by school security and the cops, shot at by small-time crooks, and somehow adopt a three-legged cat.
Review: Watching Driver’s Ed made me feel incredibly old. I remember seeing Kingpin, Dumb & Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and every other Farrelly Brothers movie released during their heyday. For a solid decade, Peter and Bobby Farrelly were the kings of big-screen comedy, with every one of their movies a box office success. It has been over ten years since the siblings directed the underwhelming Dumb & Dumber To, with Peter receiving critical acclaim for the Best Picture-winning Green Book, while Bobby helmed the Jack Black holiday movie, Dear Santa. Bobby is back with a new comedy, Driver’s Ed, which aims to capture the same comedic heights as his collaborative projects with his brother. With a cast of newcomers led by The White Lotus’ Sam Nivola as well as recognized actors Molly Shannon, Kumail Nanjiani, and Alyssa Milano, Driver’s Ed is an unfunny comedy aimed squarely at the Gen Z demographic. With weak writing and a nonsensical script, Driver’s Ed is a mish-mosh of teen comedy cliches that is lazier than it is just plain bad.
Driver’s Ed follows a group of high school seniors, led by Jeremy (Sam Nivola), who are enrolled in the titular class. Despite being eighteen, none of the quartet, which includes valedictorian Aparna (Mohana Krishnan), drug-dealing Yoshi (Aidan Laprete), and Evie (Sophie Telegadis), has their licenses. Jeremy, a film buff, still pines for his girlfriend Samantha (Lila Pate), who is off at college and used to drive him everywhere. When Samantha seemingly breaks up their long-distance relationship, Jeremy instinctively ditches the substitute driver’s ed teacher, Mr. Rivers (Kumail Nanjiani), to try and rescue his romance. Principal Fisher (Molly Shannon) enlists former cop and current school security guard, Officer Walsh (Tim Baltz), to bring the kids and the stolen car back. With under two hundred miles to their destination, Jeremy and his friends set out on a series of misadventures that culminate in a big college party.
Despite a brief cameo from Alyssa Milano as Jeremy’s mom, Driver’s Ed centers on the four teens and their journey. I expected shenanigans reminiscent of Farrelly classics, which often feature road trips as key set-pieces, but very little happens along the way. There is a sequence involving ditching their cell phones that is more disturbing than funny, as the high schoolers struggle to give up the safety of having a device on hand. Add being used as a getaway car for a robbery and riding in a truck full of fur coats, and Driver’s Ed just seems to be a string of events that are not all that funny or important to the story, other than introducing minor characters that will eventually factor into the ending of the movie. Molly Shannon and Kumail Nanjiani spend their scenes together in the principal’s office as they connect and we get some minor character development, but they exist mostly to pad the running time of this already overlong comedy.
The four main teens don’t have much that makes them worth watching, led by the bland Sam Nivola as the nebbish Jeremy. Making student films that sound like a cross between emulating Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson, Jeremy’s single-minded belief that he and Samantha are deeply in love sets the story in motion, but quickly loses any relevance as we are forced to see the alternate relationship potential within the friend group. Aparna is a good student who never breaks the rules, and guess what she ends up doing? Yoshi is a burnout, but we learn there is a reason he drowns his emotions in substances. Everyone has a neat, safe journey through the film, with the stakes never amounting to any real danger or consequences for anyone. These kids steal a car and don’t have licenses, but when the end of the film rolls around, with drinking and promiscuity key to the final act, they don’t carry any sort of relevance to the preceding time we spent watching Driver’s Ed.
Bobby Farrelly’s last film, the very bad Dear Santa, showed that the director may have aged out of developing the charm of old-school Farrelly Brothers comedies. Bobby co-wrote Dear Santa but was not involved at all in scripting Driver’s Ed. Thomas Moffett is credited as the screenwriter for An Actor Prepares, Shrink, and The Last International Playboy, none of which seem remotely close to the subject matter of Driver’s Ed. The main actors are all generational in the delivery of the high school seniors’ dialogue; they are portraying, despite the script feeling like it was written by a Gen Y scribe trying to emulate what Gen Z sounds like. If you have any teenagers in your family who spout contemporary slang, you will recognize familiar phrases in the movie, but they fall flat and feel like they are shoe-horned in to try to sound hip. All I can see is the meme of Steve Buscemi dressed as a teenager in how wooden and inauthentic this movie sounds.
With opening titles and credits that look somehow cheaper than the standard font used for decades, Driver’s Ed feels unfinished, unfunny, and overwhelmingly uninteresting. Comedies are meant to make you laugh, and I did not chuckle once watching this movie. Even a film generated with AI would have been more dynamic and engaging than this. Driver’s Ed is easily the worst movie from a Farrelly brother, and that includes Peter’s blemish for helming a segment of Movie 43. This is a terrible movie.
Driver’s Ed opens in select theaters and on demand beginning May 15.
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Source:
JoBlo.com
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