Movie Review: 'Adventureland'

By Mia Iverson

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Hmm … Adventureland. Just as the title leads you to believe, this movie is quite the adventure. From the same guys who brought you Superbad, which is superior to this movie in so many ways, comes this uncanny version of the 1987 life of the college-aged young adult, James, struggling with self-identity. But let’s not be too serious.

James finds himself in a predicament. Instead of using his summer after graduation to discover the romanticism of Europe, he finds himself wasting away at a very rundown amusement park because his father received a pay cut. At Adventureland, the park, he meets Em, the irresistible NYU student with a dark side. Boy meets girl. Elsewhere is a girl named Lisa P., who is every young man’s ’80s beauty. Alongside them is the Russian lit major Joel and the Adventureland managers played awkwardly (in a good way) by Bill Hader and Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig.

Amid the jumble of 20s angst and aspirations lies another issue: daddy issues. It seems that every character, save perhaps Joel and Ryan Reynold’s character, has an issue dealing with a father figure, ranging from job loss and alcoholism to replacing mothers with an evil stepmother too quickly.

All the actors do a phenomenal job convincing us that working at a theme park in the summer of 1987 is pointless, so much, in fact, that you might not need to see the movie to understand its theme.

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