In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week’s entry is about the college comedy PCU, where Favreau plays a crucial bit of comic relief.
PCU is a funhouse mirror reflection of the average American’s college experience, providing a brief snapshot of a world that maybe, kinda-sorta existed if you squinted hard enough. Among other things, PCU captured the grunge movement at its cultural zenith, and just happened to be released a mere three weeks after its figurehead took himself out. And if PCU had been a better film, or at the very least a funnier film, I’m sure we might all feel differently about that. But this movie that once merely held a mirror up to the average college campus now feels like it has a weird chip on its shoulder that has not aged it gracefully. The culture war goalposts have moved considerably in the last 30 years, leaving PCU in the dust.
The movie comes from the writing team of Adam Leff and Zak Penn, drawing on their experiences at Wesleyan University, and director Hart Bochner, most famous for playing noted sleazebag Ellis in a little film called Die Hard. Leff and Penn had previously sold their screenplay for Last Action Hero, which was then heavily rewritten by Shane Black. This was their follow-up, a college comedy originally meant to fill the same niche as Animal House. Thanks to the studio watering down their original R-rated script, it instead feels more indebted to the broad stereotypes found in a John Hughes comedy if John Hughes one day woke up and decided he suddenly cared about frat parties.
Port Chester University is our setting, where a clean-cut high school senior named Tom (Chris Young) arrives to tour the campus for the weekend. Immediately falling in with the misfit denizens of a one-time frat house known as The Pit, Tom is taken on a whirlwind tour of the campus’s various cliques and organizations. In short order we meet the grunge kids, the vegans, feminists, college republicans, and various other thinly sketched stereotypes that may have once existed in the halls of higher learning. Tom’s tour guide through this hell of mutually exclusive scenes is Droz (Jeremy Piven, answering the question “what did we do before Ryan Reynolds was invented?”). Droz is a graduating senior whose receding hairline makes him seem like he’s been a college student for at least a decade, but he’s our straight man for all the nonsense swirling around him, actively stirring the pot as he sees fit.
The film’s actual plot concerns the college republicans’ attempts to evict the kids living in The Pit and take it back for themselves. Spearheading their efforts is Rand McPherson (David Spade), an Aryan poster boy whose entire motivation is making Droz’s life a living hell. Rand plots with the school’s president (Jessica Walter) to take over The Pit once enough complaints and damage claims have been filed against the crew currently living there. In a word: Gentrification. Slapped with a $7000 fine, Droz has no choice but to pull his crew together and throw the most radical, hellacious party the school’s ever seen, and charge $5 a head for the privilege.
A normal movie would be able to take this very simple plot and hang a variety of colorful set pieces around it. An opening tour of the campus that actually introduces all the cliques we’re gonna see later on, instead of just gliding through them. Introducing all the various residents of The Pit so we care about whether or not they lose their student housing, instead of just showing cool kids being cool and expecting that to be enough. Setting up the final scheme that ends with the big party, instead of having everyone just fall ass backwards into it…
I dunno, I feel like I’m being harsh on the movie, when none of this is really its fault. It’s only 79 minutes long, and can’t afford to waste time on things like ‘establishing motivations’ or ‘introducing characters’. PCU has places to be and doesn’t have time for our bullshit.
As the title suggests, PCU is a film lampooning the political correctness of the era. As Droz takes Tom around campus, Tom inadvertently makes enemies of the vegans1 protesting the school cafeteria for serving meat, somehow runs afoul of man-hating ‘womynists’ and an afrocentric pride group at the same time, and even manages to piss off the actual college students2 doing real work in the computer lab by tripping over the one extension cord and erasing everyone’s senior theses. I guess this was before they invented laying a rug down over the cord running across the floor. Or maybe they rightly saw that as a fire hazard and just decided to leave it to chance.
The way all these groups are portrayed really feels like a precursor to the kind of reckless sniping that gave rise to South Park Republicans and the like later in the 90s, where the very act of caring about any given cause makes you a sucker, and you deserve to be mocked for it. Early on, Droz tells Tom to steer clear of all these groups, but to also step on eggshells around them for fear of attracting their ire. Which, of course, he does. The angry horde of ’causeheads’ out for Tom’s blood magically becomes the plot device that fixes everything when The Pit needs guests for its party.
The whole thing has the feel of recent college grads looking back on their time and laughing at what a joke the whole thing was. That’s how a lot of the dialogue feels, at least. And there’s a whole undercurrent that shows how completely pointless a lot of college life really is. “You can major in Game Boy if you know how to bullshit,” Droz tells Tom at one point. It feels like exactly the kind of movie Ellis from Die Hard would make to convince kids that college is a waste of money and they should just invest in the stock market instead.
At one time, PCU played pretty regularly on HBO and Comedy Central, so I’ve seen this movie more times that any 90s kid really should. I remember at the time taking the bait hook, line and sinker, and thinking this was really what college was going to be like. And now that I’m twenty years removed from that part of my life, I can look back on PCU and see it for the crock of shit it actually is. This movie is currently not available on any streaming service, and has never been reissued on blu-ray. May it stay that way.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
One character we glossed over completely is Gutter, played by a doughy, dreadheaded Jon Favreau. Gutter is our resident idiot, a big dumb brute whose brain-addled subplot is the only truly memorable thing about the film. Droz puts Gutter on beer duty for the big party, sending him into town where he instead gets high with the stoners, misses his ride to a Parliament/Funkadelic concert, and then hitches a ride back to The Pit on the P-Funk bus after the band apparently got lost on their way to their own gig. So Gutter returns to The Pit with George Clinton3 & Co. in tow, who agree to perform at the party, completely saving the entire day. And then slowly, but surely, all the warring cliques and crews about campus find their way to The Pit looking for Tom, where the one thing they can all agree on is that Parliament rules, so let’s all stop fighting and just enjoy the concert. Makes sense to me. It’s at least a pretty good concert.
The best joke in the entire movie revolves around Gutter who, stoned out of his gourd, wanders around town paranoid that everyone will know how high he is. He then passes out and has a dream where he’s sitting in front of a judiciary committee, forced to answer for his drug use. We see Favreau edited into an actual congressional hearing, where he’s grilled by the likes of Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch. Future president Joe Biden is sitting there too, but seems to have no questions for Gutter.
The cast and crew apparently loved Favreau. Director Bochner called him the smartest guy in the room, despite playing the dumbest character in the film. According to him, Favreau was constantly coming up with ideas for the film, which is at odds with Piven’s recollection that Bochner wouldn’t let Piven improvise at all. Even then they knew this guy was going places. I can’t say the movie would be nothing without Favreau—his role is simply not that important—but he’s still easily the highlight of an otherwise pretty dire comedy. I’m sure that won’t be the last time I’ll say that.
FINAL RATING
2 stars (out of 5). S’not great.
NEXT TIME: Vegas, baby…
- “Causeheads,” Droz calls them. “They find a world-threatening issue and stick with it for about a week.”
↩︎ - In the world of PCU, the nameless rabble simply trying to study and graduate are just as worthy of derision as every other activist group on campus. Fuck you for learning!
↩︎ - At first I wondered why Clinton even agreed to do the film in the first place, then I remembered this was just a year after Clinton covered Was Not Was’ “Walk The Dinosaur” for the Super Mario Bros. movie, which he freely admitted he did for the money. ↩︎
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