PIZZA MOVIE Review

There's a version of Pizza Movie that probably shouldn't work. Honestly, most versions of it shouldn't.

And yet, somehow, this one does.

Directed by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, Pizza Movie follows two college roommates, Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone), who make what feels like a very manageable decision.

Take an experimental drug. Order a pizza. Stay in. Do nothing.

That plan does not hold.

What should be a lazy night quickly fractures into something far more chaotic. Their grip on reality starts to slip before the delivery ever arrives. The apartment stops feeling real. People come and go in ways that don't quite track. Conversations stretch too long, or not long enough. At a certain point, the movie stops pretending this is normal and just leans into it.

Some comedies build toward something. Others wander. Pizza Movie practically dares you to keep up as it stumbles, sprints, and hallucinates its way through a premise so thin it eventually becomes the entire joke.

The plot is simple: get the pizza. Everything else is escalation.

A quick interaction becomes a full scene. A full scene becomes a detour. A detour becomes something else entirely. The apartment turns into a revolving door of increasingly bizarre encounters. Neighbors who may or may not exist. Authority figures who feel like they wandered in from a different movie. Moments that shift from paranoia to fantasy without much warning.

There's a stretch with a delivery driver that goes on just long enough to become funny again. A trip outside that feels like it lasts forever. At one point, the whole thing starts to resemble a warped odyssey through their own neighborhood. And then Daniel Radcliffe shows up. Because why wouldn't he?

It starts to feel less like a movie and more like a series of bits loosely stitched together, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The joke density is relentless. It just keeps going. Some of it lands, some of it really does not, but it rarely slows down enough for that to matter. If a joke misses, there's another one right behind it. Sometimes that one misses too. Then another.

It's comedy built on volume and momentum. When it works, it really works. In a very specific, very dumb way.

And that's kind of the whole thing. Pizza Movie knows exactly what it is.

It is not trying to be sharp or meaningful or even especially memorable. It just wants to be funny for 90-ish minutes and then leave. There's something genuinely nice about that clarity.

Though it does run out of steam. The structure only stretches so far, and you can feel it by the end. What feels chaotic early on starts to feel a little repetitive later, like it's circling the same idea just slightly louder each time. The sketch-like rhythm begins to show its limits.

Still, it's easy to go along with. It commits to the bit and never stops throwing things at you. In an era where comedies are either trying too hard or not trying hard enough, there's something refreshing about one that just wants to make you laugh and call it a day.

Pizza Movie is not trying to be the next great comedy. It's trying to be a good time.

And more often than not, it succeeds.

🍿 Score: 78/100