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Does the movie lead up to a competition between the two dorm houses where they have to compete in a series of campus games? Come on, you probably already know the answer.
Does the movie feature a love interest for Taj who is initially in love with the bully villain, only to have her slowly realize that her current boyfriend is a jerk, and the much nicer "loser" characters are a better fit for her? You bet it does. You could pretty much watch any college comedy from the 80s, make a check list of all the things you saw, and you'll see them all over again in Van Wilder 2, only a lot lamer and with much less energy and enthusiasm. The only thing it manages to do is make you look fondly back at the movies that were actually able to pull the idea off. The whole "unpopular kids rising up to beat the popular kids at their own game" storyline is as old as the campus comedy itself, and Van Wilder 2 does absolutely nothing to set it apart from the crowd. Naturally, the sorry residents of The Barn are picked on by the snobbish Pipp and his friends, so Taj decides to change all that by passing on Van Wilder's wisdom onto his new friends, and turning them into proud winners who can hold their heads up high. Instead, Taj finds himself in a run down dorm house known as "The Barn" that is made up entirely out of a small group of cliched college losers including the nerdy Gethin (Anthony Cozens), the large-breasted Sadie (Holly Davidson), an angry Scotsman named Seamus (Glen Berry), and a video game obsessed mute named Simon (Steven Rathman). (The character of Van Wilder does not appear in this movie, but Taj literally never shuts up about him, so it almost feels like Ryan Reynolds is in this movie in spirit form.) When he arrives at his new college, he is immediately rejected by the stuffy fraternity that rules the campus and is led by the stuck up Pipp Everett (Daniel Percival). The story centers on Taj as he travels overseas to England to continue his education, and pass on the wisdom of his former mentor, Van Wilder, to just about anyone who will stop and listen. But here, he is saddled with a script so lame that it is sometimes insulting. To be fair, Penn has proven that he can carry a movie with the stoner comedy cult classic Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Even if you are one of the deranged individuals who actually wished for a sequel to the original Van Wilder, you're bound to be disappointed with this half-assed attempt at making a franchise out of a forgettable film from four years ago.īecause the original film's leading man, Ryan Reynolds, was too busy making garbage like The Amityville Horror remake and Waiting to appear in this sequel, we're stuck with Kal Penn, who played Reynolds' Indian sidekick Taj in the last film, as the star this time around.
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And that, really, is what Van Wilder 2 boils down to. How else can you explain how this movie shamelessly steals plot elements and scenes from past college comedies such as the original Revenge of the Nerds, Animal House, or the American Pie films? While I'm sure this device is handy in a pinch if a studio needs a script in a hurry, it apparently also features an unfortunate side effect in that it removes all the humor and joy from these scripts, leaving us with nothing more than a pale imitation. Having seen National Lampoon's Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj, I am now convinced more than ever that there is a device somewhere in Hollywood where studio heads can feed a bunch of old scripts into it, and the machine will spit out a new script made up of bits and pieces of the old ones.