Ian feels like he must to be the only person in America who hasn’t yet had sex. Why, even his 14-year-old kid brother has done much more than just make out with a girl.
(Don’t ask how he crudely proves it to Ian.)
Ian does however have one last hope to “redeem” his questioned manhood. By posting an enhanced, “studly” picture of himself on his Facebook page and sounding all flex-and-grunt manly in his online conversations, he’s been able to attract the attention of a pretty young thing who calls herself Ms. Tasty. This brash blonde lives several states away in Tennessee. But to show her level of interest, Tasty IMs, “If you drive all the way for me, I’ll go all the way for you.”
Ian can’t believe his “good luck.” But he’s nervous. So he talks the situation over with his best bud, Lance, who’s a rather chubby and nerdy-looking fellow but incredibly handy with the ladies. Lance guarantees his friend that if they can make their way to Tennessee, he’ll help Ian make it all the way to home base.
At Lance’s urging, Ian “borrows” his older brother’s beloved ’69 GTO. Spunky gal-pal Felicia climbs in at the last minute to add a feminine touch. And these three stooges set off on what Ian hopes will be the sexual road trip of a lifetime.
Beneath his hormonal angst, Ian is a nice guy. He has a solid friendship with Felicia that he highly values and doesn’t want to endanger. The two eventually realize that the close friendship they share is the perfect foundation for romance. Near the end of the film he puts his life in danger to help her.
Even the lumpy lothario, Lance, finds the girl of his dreams and decides that having a faithful relationship is preferable to sleeping around.
When the teens’ stolen GTO breaks down, a young Amish man, Ezekiel, helps them out. (He has a vast knowledge of classic engines.) Ian and his friends subsequently attend an Amish rave.
Felicia refers to her cousin as the “Antichrist.” A young girl collecting for a church charity is hit on and verbally abused by two guys. A hitchhiker begins a threat with, “As God is my witness.” When Ian’s older brother, Rex, fears that Ian is gay, he tells him to go have sex with a woman “like the good Lord intended.” Later, he sees Ian kissing a girl and says, “Thank God.”
During the credits, Ezekiel starts to mockingly pray with the guys from the band Fall Out Boy (who play at the rave).
With a title like Sex Drive you can be assured that there’s going to be plenty of hormonal fires raging onscreen. And without question the movie lets its id run wild. Girls dress in outfits designed to show lots of skin, and the camera makes sure audiences get clear views of everything the two male leads ogle. Up-close-and-personal shots of cleavage, bare midriffs and g-strings compete for screen time with up-skirt peeks and other objectifying images.
And that’s when these women are actually wearing clothes. Amish girls rip open their shirts to expose their breasts to the band at the rave. Felicia hikes up her skirt to urinate in a radiator as a family drives slowly by. A boy in the backseat snaps a digital photo—which we see with a tiny star blocking the teen’s genitals. A group of buxom dancers strip off their costumes in the stage wings (as a visibly aroused Ian watches).
Male genitalia is a common thread. And the guys are also seen nude. A stranger in a gas station restroom strips naked and inserts his erect phallus through a hole into the stall where Ian sits. (A thin sheet of toilet paper barely gave the MPAA an excuse to preserve the film’s R rating.) An elderly man sits with his boxer shorts pulled up and his genitals hanging out the leg hole. And when Ian dresses in a donut costume for his job, some joker glues a giant dildo to the front of the costume (a gag that eventually involves a dad and his 6-year-old daughter).
It gets worse. From oral sex and nocturnal emissions to the intimation of sexual defecation, Sex Drive gleefully embraces deviant sexual behaviors and gratuitously graphic conversations from title to credits.
Lance says to Ian, “You know what every girl I ever banged had in common? I wasn’t friends with any of them.”
Plenty of slaps, cuffs and tumbles for everyone. Ian is most often the one who is pratfall-prone. He gets hit in the head with a car door, punched down a staircase by an angry dad, has his nipples wrenched by his brother, gets smacked in the face with a flying radiator cap and is sent reeling by an overstretched bungee cord.
Lance is chased (while naked) by a girl’s enraged boyfriend—who’s carrying a baseball bat. Before the big lug can really unleash on Lance, however, Ian hits the guy with his car. A thug is threatening Felicia with a gun when Ian knocks him down, takes the weapon and shoots him in the leg. The baddie keeps coming and Ian grinds his heel into the wound.
Over 60 f-words and about 50 s-words burn though the script. Numerous vulgar and obscene references are made to male and female genitalia. God’s and Jesus’ names are blasphemed repeatedly, with “God” being combined with “d–n” over 10 times. The words “d–n,” “a–,” “h—” and “b–ch” bring the total tally to somewhere around 200.
While sex is the flick’s modus operandi, booze flows freely along the way. Ezekiel tells Lance about an Amish tradition called Rumspringa where Amish kids run crazy at age 16. That’s evidenced at the wild-drinking rave, which features lots of smoking, drinking (and puking) youths. Ian, Lance and other teens also drink beer and harder alcohol at a pool party. A number of people smoke cigarettes. Lance smokes a cigar.
During an arrest scene, the police are depicted as bumbling oafs. While on the road, the teen trio find themselves in a race, driving recklessly and barely escape wrecking the car.
Speaking of the GTO, when it breaks down, the teens all urinate into the radiator. A hitchhiker urinates copiously on a car window. And an old woman is shown urinating while sitting on an exposed toilet in a jail cell.
Back when I was in school, there was this kid—let’s call him Eddie—a typical clown-boy/miscreant who always liked seeing how far he could push things to get a laugh. One week we had a young, inexperienced substitute teacher who hadn’t yet learned the disciplinary ropes, and Eddie goaded her mercilessly. With each escalating act, he’d seek the class’s approval with a look that said, “See what I just did?”
As the next generation of so-called “teen comedies” hits the theater (many of such a hard-R nature that teens shouldn’t be allowed to even view their publicity posters) they give the impression that Hollywood has become a breeding ground for Eddies. Each successive flick in this genre, from Porky’s to Superbad, desperately tries to top the raunch that’s come before it.
Obscene language, beer binges and equal-opportunity nudity have been pegging the boor meter for a while now. So Sex Drive ups the ante by mixing all of that with Hollywood’s latest plateau of sexual perversion: public urination, gooey underwear, toilet stall “glory holes,” bondage and sexual defecation is now the new territory to explore for directors named Eddie, er, in this case, Sean Anders. He even takes the opportunity at the end of the credits to give us one last outtake shot of an elderly man with his sagging scrotum hanging out of his boxer shorts. It’s nothing more than one final “See what I just did?”
I should mention at this point that something heartening happened in the theater I sat in before we got to this sordid send-off. About halfway through the screening, a group of girls in their late teens stood up and walked out. They had seen enough. And that’s when I started thinking about Eddie. Because back then, if no discipline-minded adults were around to stop the nonsense, the only way we could get him to shut up was to stop paying attention. And perhaps that’s the best way to deal with our cinematic Eddies today: Utterly ignore them and force them to finally grow up.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
