Write a commentRaise your hand if you've ever been told a joke. I can't see any of you, so we'll just do this on the honor system.
When I say "joke", I mean a set up and a punchline. What I don't mean is sarcasm or generally being mean to elicit some sort of reaction out of someone. If you and a coworker are called into a meeting with your supervisor and you decide to call that supervisor some colorful name, you could elicit a laugh, but that's not truly a joke.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
For decades, I never understood this joke. Mainly because I didn't understand the "humor" that relied on the obviousness of the answer.
To get to the other side.
It does qualify as a joke, even if it isn't funny to me. For any David Mamet fans out there, he wrote and directed a film in 2001 called Heist where Delroy Lindo asks and answers, "You know why the chicken crossed the road? Because the road crossed the chicken." This I laughed at, mainly because it's silly, especially in its delivery.
If you were to break down what makes a joke successful, there are at least three key elements: setup, punchline and delivery. My mother used to print out jokes from the internet that were pages upon pages long and the punchline was typically something incredibly banal.
Because the priest, you see, was actually a Rabbi.
She'd deliver the punchline with such pride, grinning ear-to-ear like it was some lost Will Rogers witticism. It became a running gag in our family that when my mother would pull out a packet of paper, she was about to tell us a joke. Us busting her chops became funnier than anything in the dissertation she'd just read.
Pizza Movie reminds me of all the worst parts of what passes for humor these days. This is not being an old man or Puritanical with what I find funny. Much of what we see in this film is about the execution than anything else. We're told what is supposed to be funny instead of the audience finding out on their own.
The premise of Pizza Movie is very simple. Two roommates in college (Matarazzo, Giambrone) are going through the trials and tribulations everyone does at school. Jack (Matarazzo) has become a social pariah after a prank he did got the entire football team in a heap of trouble. Montgomery (Giambrone) is trying desperately to work up the courage to ask someone out. They find a drug that they take, finding out shortly thereafter they only cure from the bad side effects of the drug is to eat pizza.
Thus begins their quest.
If we continue with the joke metaphor, Pizza Movie is the equivalent of one of those jokes my mother so proudly told. But, instead of my mother's measured cadence and volume, imagine instead she was screaming every single word of it. Pizza Movie is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. That's not saying it has to be, but the performances and directorial style are constantly at an 11.
It is as though the filmmakers believed that if everyone was constantly making funny faces and screaming all their lines that that would convince people they saw a funny movie. A lot of critics have gone on to say that this is a stoner movie and I think the movie hides behind that as if to save themselves legitimate criticism. There are many "stoner movies" that are still well-directed and performed. They're not constantly grabbing you by the wrist and screaming in your face, "HEY, THIS IS FUNNY AND, IF YOU DON'T LAUGH, YOU'RE NOT COOL!"
Each of the actors seem to be under the assumption that making big silly faces is what makes a joke land. Lulu Wilson, who I've seen in multiple things at this point, is the biggest offender of the main three characters. Anytime there's a "funny" situation, her eyes go wide and she just stares. The other projects I've seen her in make me realize that her doing this is less her fault and more tha fault of the directors for not curtailing this.
There were a couple of moments where I laughed, but a couple of times over 97 minutes hardly warrants a ticker-tape parade. The film feels custom made for people that don't pay that much attention to movies, opting instead to play on their phones. Every 5-10 minutes, the characters get into a problem, scream at each other, get out of the problem. Rinse, repeat.
With the access that people have now to all different streaming services as well as the ability to purchase a film physically, you don't have to go far to find a better movie, comedy or stoner comedy. After all, the bar isn't set that high. The leads are uninteresting, unfunny. Giambrone reminds me of Lee Evans. Matarazzo is clearly coasting on his Stranger Things fame. If this film is any indication, he's not even remotely ready to have a "leading man" career.
As I've said before, funny is a lot like scary or sexy. It's in the eye of the beholder. There might be someone out there who loves this movie and they're well within their rights to. From a technical standpoint, it fails. From a humor standpoint, maybe 1 out of 100 "jokes" landed for me.
And I can say, without reservation, after watching Pizza Movie, I was practically begging to hear one of my mother's epic internet jokes. At least those didn't cost me the price of a subscription to Hulu to hear.
Pizza Movie (2026)
Directed by Brian McElhaney & Nick Kocher
Cast: Gaten Matarazzo, Sean Giambrone, Lulu Wilson, Jack Martin, Sarah Sherman
Runtime: 97 minutes
MPAA Rating: Not rated (includes pervasive language, adult situations, pervasive drug use and gore)
Rating (out of ****): 1/2
Pizza Movie is currently streaming on Hulu with a subscription.
