An "American Pie" on campus, a "Sorority Boys" without the cross-dressing and a "Crossroads" without Britney, "Van Wilder" is a gross-out film dealing with the stereotypical debauchery of college life which culminates in grandiose soul searching and budding romance.
Wilder, a leisure studies major at Coolidge College-notably located near Mt. Holyoke-is a living legend whose classmates all but kiss the ground he walks on. Scooting about in his designer golf cart replete with the sound and security systems one has come to expect of a trust-fund baby's wheels, Wilder is accompanied by his best friend Hutch (Teck Holmes) and his personal assistant Taj Mahal Badalandabad (Kal Penn) on a journey to stay at Coolidge indefinitely.
However, compared to his "National Lampoon's Animal House" predecessors, who exist in a state of filth and leave a path of terror in their wake, Wilder is an enigma.
It is this fact that award-winning college journalist Gwen Pearson (Tara Reid) is sent to investigate in a series of student profiles about Wilder. He has the entire campus captivated with his bona fide good guy profile and his selfless extracurricular endeavors.
He is the guy who goes around campus raising money for struggling organizations, helping the less fortunate with their medical ailments (see Sick Boy (Jason Hopkins)) and helping the dorks on campus throw legendary keggers so they can (maybe) get laid.
But Wilder's selfless personality, rarely seen in this genre of cool-guy, big-man-on-campus film, makes him enemies as well-most notably in the form of the old-boys'-club Delta Iota Kappa fraternity (DIK). Led by the uber-asshole Richard Bagg (Daniel Cosgrove), the DIKs attempt to get Wilder expelled when Bagg gets jealous that Gwen's profiling of Wilder is getting in the way of their relationship.
But let's be honest: there really isn't much more to the movie than that. There are a few scenes where the director and writers were clearly seeking to make as many audience members as possible vomit. And there is the traditional obsession with excrement, breasts and general degeneracy. Hell, there were people in the theater screaming "No, don't show that!" when Bagg and his DIK buddies were chowing down on éclairs that Wilder and his crew had filled with semen from Wilder's sexually frustrated bulldog.
Not all of the humor was in good taste and numerous critics have pointed out that the movie mocks the elderly, the overweight, the infirm, midgets, foreigners and even women. None of these are "new" subjects to this genre of movie and, if other reviewers would lighten up, they would come to realize that such jokes were generally benign. Van Wilder makes fun of the normal characters just as much as it does the "freaks" and "outsiders."
What makes this movie unique, however, is its glorification of "good" people and its general lack-with the exception of Bagg-of truly "bad" people. It's a light-hearted tribute to the fun a person can have while still being a credit to society as a whole.
Taj, with his over-the-top Indian accent, social aloofness and overall obsession with sex, is a vibrant character whose idea of humor consists of lines about oral sex and female anatomy. Despite his vulgarity Taj remains a lovable character that the audience roots for rather than despises. Even Wilder's professorial nemesis McDoogle (Paul Gleason), whose parking space Wilder usually steals, turns out to be a good guy.
An art-house flic it ain't, but in the vein of wildly successful films like "American Pie," "Road Trip," "Revenge of the Nerds" and (its big brother) "Animal House," "Van Wilder" is a laugh-a-minute, lowbrow riot-provided you don't take yourself too seriously.