Those two movies were absurd circuses of male hormones and identifiable universes where college kids were eager to grow up, and the grown-ups were depressed that they had. The makers of those films, Todd Phillips and Scot Armstrong, skipped a third episode and made the upcoming "Starsky and Hutch" instead. It's just as well: "Eurotrip" is just "Road Trip" with a ratty passport.
The gears of the plot remain unchanged and unpolished: Boy drags three friends on long-distance quest for girl. The wrinkle here is the discovery by Scotty (Scott Mechlowicz) that the affectionate German pen pal whom he spurns for being a dude is actually a chick. So Scotty and his sex-crazed pal Cooper (Jacob Pitts) agree to spend their last summer before college making their way to Berlin to win back the lass (Jessica Boehrs).
Each of the gawky boys in this movie seems very far from any sort of manhood. They don't even seem bound for the 10th grade, let alone college. Cooper, who looks and thinks like a young, mangy David Spade, actually has the poignant ancestral goal of rekindling his European sexual heritage. As far as he's concerned, America was founded by prudes, and all the repression's got him down. (This might be the first teen comedy to suggest that the house that the Paris Hilton sex tape and the Coors Light twins built is not a home.)
"Eurotrip," which appears to be disillusioned with how juvenile and teasing American notions of sex can be, celebrates its R-rating like a kid on his 21st birthday. It ups the physical-contact ante enough for you to forget that some of its writers are the nincompoops who loaded "The Cat in the Hat" with sex jokes.
In Paris, Scotty and Cooper meet up with their sibling pals Jenny (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Jamie (Travis Wester), whom Cooper describes as "the worst twins ever." In Amsterdam, uptight Jamie gets lucky (and robbed) in a dark alley, while Cooper (always Cooper) is treated to the whims of Lucy Lawless in an S&M parlor called Club VanDerSexxx. The Europe these kids discover is a pop-up book, consistent only with other people's exaggerations of trips taken when they were 18.
