Both an obvious product of ’90s nostalgia and the definitive cure for it, Bobby Farrelly‘s terminally innocuous “Driver’s Ed” can be described as a youth comedy, but whose youth? Though technically it is set in the current day, because smartphones exist and someone mentions Ritalin, the sensibilities of both director and screenplay (by Thomas Moffett) are so trapped in the past that the whole movie feels like a defrosted caveman sporting a pair of earbuds — which is essentially the plot of 1992’s “Encino Man,” apropos of nothing much except that after “Driver’s Ed,” all your comparisons will for a time gesture toward pre-millennial pop-cultural artifacts.
It’s hard to remember that era being quite so unfunny, though, nor quite so tame, which is especially disappointing given that Farrelly, working with his brother Peter on films like “There’s Something About Mary” and “Dumb and Dumber” was responsible for some of its best and most iconically risqué gags. Nothing in “Driver’s Ed” even aspires to “Mary”‘s semen-hair-gel moment, and the closest we get to the “frank or beans” sequence is some frat dude at a party who randomly punches guys in the groin, causing them unhilariously to double over in pain. The rest of “Driver’s Ed” — aside from some effortful F-bombing and the occasional reference to boners — is just as wholesome as apple pie used to be before “American Pie” (1999) defiled that simile forever.
Speaking of wholesome, here comes Jeremy (Sam Nivola), the film’s clean-cut, starry-eyed, curly headed lead, an 18-year-old high school senior determined to make a success of a long-distance relationship with his recently graduated girlfriend Samantha. Movie-mad Jeremy (whose conversation is peppered with namechecks of only the most canonically revered of Hollywood films) is so convinced he and Sam will stay together until he can graduate and join her at college, that when she drunk-dials him and expresses some doubt, he goes into a tailspin. The next day, during driver’s ed class, left momentarily in the instruction car by the substitute teacher played by Kumail Nanjiani in two broken-arm casts for wackiness, Jeremy decides on a whim to steal the vehicle and drive the three hours to see Sam in person.
However, in the car with him are three classmates: prim, rule-obeying valedictorian Aparna (Mohana Krishan); apathetic, drug-dealing stoner Yoshi (Aidan Laprete); and perky yet cynical Evie (Sophie Telegadis), whose feathered, flippy, pastel-barette bob gives extreme mid-’90s Drew Barrymore/Reese Witherspoon and does not give it back. You do not need to be a hair historian to know that no young person has worn her hair like this, outside of “come as your mom when she was your age” costume parties, in about 30 years.
Anyway, despite the group not being particularly close, and despite all three others expressing their disapproval of Jeremy’s plan in no uncertain terms, they all suddenly decide to join him because that way we get to have a movie. Once on the road, they have a bunch of bizarre yet oddly flat encounters — with a three-legged cat, a robber, a cop, a refrigerated truck full of vintage furs and a hot lesbian with an open-top car and a large St. Bernard — before arriving at Sam’s college having learned some inevitable lessons about life, love and friendship. Meanwhile, the usually reliable Molly Shannon delivers an inexplicably manic performance of exasperated adult ineptitude as the school principal trying, with a lot of faffing about but very little urgency, to track the kids down.
To be strictly fair, “Driver’s Ed” doesn’t only reference the 1990s high school comedy. It also has an only too obvious yen for the 1980s, and specifically for “The Breakfast Club,” which is cribbed from here in a brief makeover scene and the cloyingly extended finale when the kids all marvel at just how much they’ve bonded. But while John Hughes’ soon-to-be-Criterion-approved classic has its implausibilities, it never attempts any setpiece as frankly ludicrous as the one in “Driver’s Ed” where three 2025 teenagers stand dumbly to one side while a fourth attempts to “hide” their beloved iPhones on a tiny ledge on a bridge over a river, with utterly predictable results.
Not that this is the fault of an appealing young cast gamely doing their best to inject energy and personality into inert, exposition-heavy, joke-light dialogue that could not sound less like the way modern teenagers talk if every second word was “rad.” “Everybody changes all the time,” Shannon’s principal scoffs at the doggedly faithful Jeremy at one point. It’s a shame that “Driver’s Ed” seems to believe that, in the decades since the high school comedy first came of age, teenagers haven’t changed so much as a hair on their heads.
