87 min | R | March 26, 2021 | Netflix
Chris Carey falls for his high school crush and drags his best friend on a cross-country road trip to win her. The road, the strangers, and the chaos are all real. The marks just do not know they are extras in someone else’s love story.
Chris Carey works a dead-end job at a smoothie stand in Florida. He runs into Maria Li, his high school crush, and convinces himself she is the love of his life. He talks his best friend Bud Malone into a road trip to New York to find her. The catch is that everyone around them is real. The stunts happen in public, in front of strangers who believe what they see. Bad Trip uses a scripted buddy comedy as the skeleton for a hidden-camera experiment about how ordinary people respond to chaos.
Eric André plays Chris as a sweet open wound. He commits to physical danger that would stop most actors. He bleeds and screams and never breaks the fiction in front of the marks. Lil Rel Howery plays Bud as the reluctant conscience who gets dragged deeper into each scheme. Tiffany Haddish plays Trina Malone, Bud’s escaped-convict sister, and turns menace into something gleeful and unhinged. Michaela Conlin plays Maria Li as the oblivious object of the whole doomed quest.
Kitao Sakurai directs with a documentary patience that the gags require. He and writer Dan Curry build each set piece so the punch line forces a real reaction from a real stranger. The cameras hide in vans and storefronts and shoot through long lenses to keep the marks from spotting them. The editing carries the whole construction. Sakurai cuts between the actors hitting their beats and bystanders deciding whether to help or run. The seams between scripted and unscripted never show, which is the hardest trick the film pulls.
The prank format usually rewards cruelty. Bad Trip wants the opposite. The funniest moments come when strangers step in to comfort Chris or talk Bud out of a bad decision. The film keeps proving that most people are decent when they think no one is performing for them. That decency is the actual subject under the gross-out stunts. The buddy plot is thin on purpose, because the real story belongs to the people who do not know they are in a movie.