With the abundance of options at our hands, it’s very easy to get bored and not feel like doing anything. Content fatigue is real. You could be switching from one Netflix movie to the other, looking for something that fits the mood, but the list is so non-exhaustive, the process would probably turn into a journey itself. Sitcoms, rom-coms, joke-styled news telecasts, stand-ups have grown so very common these days; you could be looking for something light-hearted, something not serious just to pass the time, but keep being directed towards the same type of content.
This is how I came across Bad Trip one fine evening. I was surfing around Netflix for something “unusual” to watch. Everything was feeling overdone, and I was bored. The comedy movie that I dug up was very unusual. The jokes weren’t the regular kind, and everything felt different.
The movie begins as Chris (Eric Andre) finds out his high school crush currently lives in New York. He assigns himself with a mission to find this woman and win over her heart. Partnered up with his best friend Bud (Lil Rel Howery), he steals Bud’s sister Trina’s (Tiffany Haddish) flashy pink sedan and sets down the road, thinking that the sister can’t harm them since she’s in prison. Little do they know that their thuggish sister would soon break out of jail and come looking for the people who dare steal her car.
Throughout the journey, the duo stops at various places and interacts with unsuspecting passers-by. The movie is more a hidden camera prank show, but with a story like actual movies. Furthermore, since everything is improvised, the camera work and the quality degrades at places. It feels like one of those early 90s movies when colorful videography had just become normal, and HD was still miles to go.
The plot of the entire thing is really not that important, and the viewer will constantly find themselves forgetting where they were on their hunt to find Maria Li (Michaela Conlin), the woman. The main parts of the movie are the hidden camera pranks. The music choice is unusual, and there mostly is close to nothing ever playing in the background, which sounds fine since we don’t really have anything playing in the background in real life. The duo (and sometimes Trisha) breaks into a bar, a grocer’s store, a restaurant, an art gallery and even a party in awkward conditions, all parts of the play.
The jokes were as interesting as practical jokes go. At the end of the movie, the cast pops out from behind the bushes with their hidden cameras and embraces the people that got involved. Every sketch carefully captures the reactions of the people before they get to know that they are in a TV show. The analysis itself could be something worth watching.
If not for boredom, this kind of content might feel a bit too unusual for some tastes. However, if you are in the mood for something that you couldn’t have ever thought of and have nothing better to do currently, Bad Trip is a definite must-watch. I would argue that IMDb’s 6.5 is a little too harsh on them; however, I would not rate it too high either.