From Animal House to Project X, the party movie has a long and distinguished heritage. There are a set of common ingredients for these comedies: There’s a high school or college-age main character, like Molly Ringwald’s Sam in Sixteen Candles, who is smart and kind but feels like an outcast. There’s the wild friend, like Ashton Kutcher’s Jesse in Dude, Where’s My Car?, who goads the strait-laced hero into a night of debauchery, usually on the last night of the school year. There’s a clique of antagonistic popular kids at the top of the school’s social pyramid who lord their power over our socially awkward heroes. There’s the secret, illicit party, ripe with the promise of drugs and sex, that our central friends are trying to find. Then there’s the rogues gallery of, in the immortal words of the school secretary in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, “the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, and dickheads,” who provide fodder for some over-the-top comedy.
The last great party movie was 2019’s Booksmart, which was one of the best comedies of the last decade. With brilliant direction by Olivia Wilde and a pair of inspired performances from Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever as a pair of overachieving best friends who throw caution to the wind once they’ve been accepted to their first-choice colleges, they upended the bro-heavy Superbad formula by letting women be just as irresponsible as the guys — right down to Billie Lourd as the film’s druggie Spicoli figure. Now, director Carey Williams and writer K.D. Dávila bring the party picture to the Black college scene with Emergency.
Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler) are roomies and best friends at the fictional Buchanan College. Their personalities are opposite. Kunle is a straight-A student with aspirations of pursuing a Ph.D. at Princeton. Sean, on the other hand, has skated through his four years of college untroubled by things like ambition and responsibility. They are united, along with their third housemate Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), by their love of good weed. As graduation approaches, Sean convinces Kunle to make an attempt at the college’s grand slam — attending seven fraternity and sorority parties in one manic night. He’s pulled strings, called in favors, and traded bud for invites to all the soirees, but Kunle is predictably reluctant. Achieving a perfect GPA means successfully completing one last science lab experiment with some recalcitrant fungi, and Kunle wants to check to make sure his subjects are progressing as planned. That throws off Sean’s carefully considered schedule of revelry — and besides, who goes to the science lab on Friday night?
When they drop by their apartment to pick up the passes, they find a surprise lying in a pool of vomit on their floor — a white girl (Maddie Nichols) overdosing on an unknown drug. Neither Sean nor Kunle know her, and Carlos, having already settled into his bedroom for a quiet night of bong rips and gaming, didn’t hear her come in.
Kunle starts to call 911, but Sean stops him. What will the paramedics, the cops, and the Princeton admissions committee think when they see two Black guys and a Hispanic guy standing over an ODed white girl? They decide it’s better to drop her off at the emergency room and make a quick exit before people start asking questions they can’t answer. But once they get her in the car, they realize that, if they get pulled over by police, they run the risk of getting shot.
Emergency sometimes plays their fear for laughs, and uses the ever-present threat of a bad encounter with a racist cop as another complication to throw into the plot. But the story, which was based on Williams’ and Dávila’s award-winning short film, makes subtle comment on other party/caper movies. If the protagonists of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off had been Black, they would have never gotten away with claiming to be the Sausage King of Chicago. Thanks to finely layered performances by Watkins and Cyler, the film puts you in the shoes of the college kids who just want to party, but for whom the potential cost of a little transgressive fun is much higher than the white college kids who let a high school girl get too wasted. Indeed, when the girl’s irresponsible sister Maddy (Sabrina Carpenter) finds out she’s in a car with three people of color, she assumes it’s a kidnapping. Emergency is a little heavier than your normal party movie, but it’s still a bong-ripping good time.
