Pizza Movie is Good, Bro
The “stoner comedy” is a subgenre often left out of its respective category’s discussion, though the narrative style is far from dead as seen in Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher’s Pizza Movie, recently released to Hulu and Disney+. Given the movie’s premise, I thought no film better to start the week reviewing than this one.
Pizza Movie stars Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone (Stranger Things, The Goldbergs) as roommates Jack and Montgomery, two ostracized college students in danger of a transfer to Gralk Hall. Said dorm is essentially the final nail in the coffin for anyone enrolled. In search of something new to help decompress, the two discover a tin of unmarked tablets to provide a relaxing high, so long as it’s supplemented with pizza. Navigating the perilous halls of their dorm while avoiding any trouble at the hands of their RA, the boys go on a journey that takes them anywhere but the food delivery automaton at the front door.
The film’s marketing was subject to something of a takeover online—screencaps of the film’s trailer only captioned with “IM GOOD BRO” implied feelings that seemed to resonate with many people on Instagram, X, and other social media platforms. McElhaney and Kocher themselves seemed puzzled by the image and its many variations, though it all came down to its actual reception upon release. While Pizza Movie won’t set the world on fire, I found it to be probably the most well-rounded and engaging stoner comedy I’ve seen in years.
Pizza Movie‘s hallucination sequences contain some of the most creative and innovative shots and concepts I’ve seen in a subgenre not known for much besides cheap laughs. The premise introduced at the beginning for Jack and Montgomery adds an underdog aspect to the story that keeps the audience hooked on what will become of the roommates. The telltale third-act breakup does feel earned as well, Matarazzo and Giambrone’s acting really selling the problems one character has with the other like they’ve been dealing with them their whole life.
The film is never super deep, though—it treats its audience like they’re more intelligent than most stoner comedies would, but the keyword of the subgenre is still comedy (depending on who you ask). Inventive as the hallucinations are, or each next phase of the drug shifting over from the last, some elements of the film feel random for the sake of randomness. I will say the parts that lean the heaviest into this chaos are in the first introduction to the drug’s effects, so the following phases of the drug don’t break the immersion as much as those early parts would if moved later into the film. At the same time, though, when some of the earliest parts feel like the peak, it makes the rest of the film feel like it’s Jack and Montgomery coming down from the high, so narratively it still makes sense the way it’s formatted. Again, it’s not that deep, but analyzing this in the same critical vain as any other movie will make some cracks start to show.
Pizza Movie is an addition to the long list of stoner comedies that I would argue pushes that type of storytelling in the right direction. At once, it combines the long-winded journeying nature of a series like Harold & Kumar but grounds it in reality by containing the high within the same building the movie starts in. It takes the viewer as many places as Jack and Montgomery, being meta and weird and funny and puzzling at the same time. And yet, the amount of devices employed by the subgenre here never feels as overwhelming for the audience as it does for its main characters. And given the day of the year, you won’t find a better movie this year to eat pizza along to while couchlocked.
Pizza Movie is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.