April 5, 2002 | Memo to Alanis Morissette: Isn’t this ironic? This weekend, Big Trouble fails to satisfy largely because some exceptionally talented folks try much too hard, and the effort shows. But National Lampoon’s Van Wilder is a beery, boisterous guilty pleasure primarily because it’s so obviously the slapdash work of underachievers who don’t really give a damn.

The knuckleheads responsible for this sporadically hilarious goof – director Walt Becker, screenwriters Brent Goldberg and David T. Wagner – pay little attention to such niceties as original plotting, character development and minimum-standard production values. (The garishly-lit cinematography and sloppy editing make the movie look every bit as cheesy as it deserves to.) Instead, they merely toss a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a great deal of everything else into a crazy salad of cheap laughs, bare breasts, anything-goes anarchy, transparently fake sentimentality – so fake, in fact, that the fakery is a wink-wink joke – and a generous sprinkling of unexpectedly understated drollery.

“That girl is a freshman!” complains the leading lady when she finds the title character in flagrante delicto. “Yeah,” Van Wilder replies with half-drunk aplomb, “but she reads at a sophomore level.”

Truth to tell, the humor rarely rises above the sophomoric level here. And some of the jokes – especially those that aim to put the gross back into gross-out comedy – are more along the line of remedial-class tomfoolery. There’s a gag – and I do mean gag -- involving éclairs that I really can’t describe, just in case you’re eating while you read this. Later on, there’s another gag about the after-effects of a laxative overdose that ups the scatological ante of a similar bit in Dumb and Dumber.

And mind you, that’s saying nothing about the flatulent stripper, the over-endowed dog, the ethnic-joke Indian exchange student, the… Well, you get the idea. George Bernard Shaw, it ain’t. It’s not even the Farrelly Brothers, even though the makers of this film obviously have studied Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary with all the rapt attentiveness that other filmmakers devote to Citizen Kane and The 400 Blows.

But did I laugh? So frequently, and so loudly, that I was afraid I would be recognized by folks seated around me, and therefore never live down the public embarrassment.

There is a plot, sort of. Van Diver, played by Ryan Reynolds with an up-yours insouciance that recalls a young Chevy Chase, is a party-hearty living legend at the fictitious Coolidge College, where he has managed to win friends, influence people and avoid graduation for seven years. Early in the movie, however, Van’s wealthy dad – played by Tim Matheson, best remembered as Otter from the original National Lampoon’s Animal House – decides to stop bankrolling his son’s lackadaisical academic career.

And so, in order to remain in college and avoid real-world responsibilities, Van does what he does best: He throws a killer party. In fact, he throws many of them, as a party planner for every fraternity, sorority and student organization willing to meet his price.

Tara Reid (a fixture of the somewhat more respectable American Pie comedies) is cast as a student-newspaper reporter who wants to write an “expose” of Van, and winds up… Yeah, OK, you already know, I don’t have to tell you. Come to think of it, I don’t have to tell you about her pompous-ass boyfriend, Richard (Daniel Cosgrove), a pre-med student who exists only to be the butt of Van’s cruelest jokes. And you’ve probably already guessed that this guy’s nickname is used several times as a punchline.

Pay no attention to the title: Except for the clever casting of Matheson, National Lampoon’s Van Wilder has nothing to do with National Lampoon’s Animal House, still the gold standard for all campus comedies and gross-out laugh riots. (Speaking of clever casting: Paul Gleason of The Breakfast Club and Curtis Armstrong of Revenge of the Nerds also appear in in-jokey supporting roles.) The title, I strongly suspect, has more to do with canny marketing (and brand-name franchising) than irreverent tradition. On the other hand, I also suspect that, in years to come, Van Wilder – much like Animal House -- will be an entertainment staple at frat-house parties all across America. Consider yourself warned.