There’s something to be said for completely sticking to your premise. Locke is the best example of this: it’s just Tom Hardy in a car for 90 minutes, talking: he never leaves. On the opposite end of the spectrum is The Package. This Netflix film completely commits to its 90 minute joke about a penis, exhausting every double entendre in the book. A stroke of genius, maybe. Oh yes, get ready everyone.
Cause we’re going on Donnie’s (Luke Spencer Roberts) camping trip: an annual boys only excursion with his 2 best friends: doofus Jeremy (Eduardo Franco) and recently back stateside Sean (Daniel Doheny). One tiny wrinkle: this trip is no longer boys only. Donnie’s ex Sarah (Sadie Calvano) and her recently single best friend Becky (Geraldine Viswanathan) tag along into the woods. The 5 get their booze on and have a blast until Jeremy’s amateur knife skills sever his dick from his body, leaving it up to his 4 friends to find a way to get him to a hospital to reattach it to his body.
Most high school raunchy comedies will most certainly have genital jokes. However, those jokes are scattered throughout a movie. In The Package, even the title is servicing the fact that this movie is built upon a house of phallic jokes. Penises get sucked, severed, attached, resevered, reattached, used as a torture device, bitten by a snake, painstakingly cleaned by a military veteran, etc. Like all dick jokes, some of them are groan inducingly bad, but some are very inspired, especially the torture scene. These jokes also help generate some funny running gags, like the fact that Jeremy wants his dick back so he can meet up with his internet girlfriend…wait for it… Kendall Jenners. Thankfully, like all the promise of a movie that’s entirely a joke about penis sayings, all these jokes have payoffs. Not all of them might be great, but at least The Package does its best to deliver to its high school boy audience what it wants.
For a movie that’s a double entendre delivery machine, you better have some great actors capable of delivering on that material. The Package goes 3 for 5. Eduardo Franco is great at playing that dumb overconfident friend that slowly wavers his confidence as the real world threatens his carefully crafted reality. You completely believe Jeremy when he says he loves Kendall Jenners despite never meeting or has a dream of writing a Britney Spears musical. It’s a good sign that even confined to a hospital bed, Franco gets a ton of laughs conversing with the nurse about his predicament. Normally in a movie like this, the sidekicks are funnier than the leads, but here, they’re the weak links. Try as Luke Spencer Roberts and Sadie Calvano might, it’s really hard to see why they would be a couple, and there’s a charisma they lack next to their counterparts. I loved Daniel Doheny in Alex Strangelove. Doheny has this knack of using dorky confidence to try and sell something, but it comes across nervously amusing; plus he’s got a great blood curdling scream. As funny as it is watching Doheny try to suck a dick, it’s funnier watching him try to profess his love to Becky and fail miserably, or repeatedly scream when people keep hitting the bruises on his back. However, again, the Aussie actress Geralding Viswanathan is the star. While other actors are pretending to be confident, Viswanathan is great carrying herself confidently, being the most woke person in the room. A great example is when Becky discovers Sean’s condom, called the F*ck King. In a normal movie, Doheny would come out the star here by panicking talking about why he has a condom like that. However, Viswanathan comes packed with several jokes ready to bust his balls, using his nervous energy to prop herself up and deliver a funnier joke with just a few words. After Blockers and this film, it’s clear to me Viswanathan is a comedic force, and should be getting as many opportunities to star in a movie as possible.
Teenagers are clearly part of Netflix’s long term strategy. The streaming site nailed the teen girl market earlier this year with 3 perfect streaming movies. That must have left teenage boys a little out in the cold, but in fairness, an entire movie about one long dick joke has a chance to be really terrible to watch. At least The Package is funny most of the way through, and will give boys a new girl to fawn over: Geraldine Viswanathan.