THE CRUSADES– 2 STARS

The Crusades reminds us that seemingly every generation of teenagers has an extreme party movie that seeks to display all the unhinged wanton behavior that festers behind the confines of school responsibilities and juvenile expectations. From Animal House to American Pie, you can pace a culture’s timeline by its rising and falling raunch level. Step forward to see that there are two ranges of perspectives that go into those types of movies. 

LESSON #1: PREVIOUS GENERATIONS TRYING TO INSPIRE THE NEXT GENERATION– The first is the target age and setting of the kids being portrayed. The second is the age of the people who pen and direct the movie. I’m willing to bet more than 90% of the teen party movies were created by a generation of people older than the characters on screen. For better or worse, those artists and storytellers are trying to channel their past youth and hijinks through younger vessels, hoping it will match and play to the present crowd. 

If the film is not a period piece like Animal House or Dazed and Confused, authenticity is a tricky proposition. That happens with teen comedies made FOR teens and not made BY teens, and The Crusades is included in that group of party movies made with a mismatched lens of an older generation.

Filmed in the well-off northwest Niles suburbs of Chicago, not a parent or authority figure is in sight as we are introduced to Leo (Outer Banks TV star Rudy Pankow), Jack (newcomer Ryan Ashton), and Sean (Khalil Everage from Cobra Kai). This trio of high school classmates from an all-male Our Lady of the Crusades private school are filmed in a slow-motion montage lifting weights, jamming to music, and pounding beers in one of their garages in preparation for some event. As it turns out, they are heading to a schoolyard fight where the loose cannon Jack is matched up for a bare-fisted brawl against a deaf kid from their rival school St. Matthew’s. 

That opening ruckus and the hare-brained scattering that follows when the cops show up introduces you to the attitude of The Crusades. The teens here are cutting loose with little thought of consequences and, for us in the audience, little visible reasoning of overall motivations. Those stenches of privilege and ambivalence carry over to their school setting, where the administrators and teachers like Dean Whitman (Greg Davis, Jr. of Day of Joy), the swole Mr. Marshall (stuntman Peter Siewerth) and the ranting Coach Krieger (Nicholas Turturro, arguably the biggest name in the movie) perpetuate more than quell the male expectation thrust on Jack, Ryan, and Sean. The manly competition stakes get higher when it is announced that Our Lady and St. Matthew’s will be merging next school year.

Circle back to the generation gap notions. To see where a teen comedy’s inspiration is coming from, track the ages of the filmmakers. Bear with some forensic movie math for a moment. A 16-year-old just barely old enough to sneak into 2012’s Project X is a 27-year-old now hopefully with a stable career and a savings account. The writer of Project X was 39 when the movie came out and the director was 35. You can create another example with the same gap for teens who engorged on Superbad five years earlier in 2007 who are likely married thirty-somethings now with a couple of kids.

This little examination is circling towards these big questions for any teen party movie. Who is telling what story? Where is their drive coming from? The answers inform the film from inception to completion. With The Crusades, directed by Leo Milano and written by himself along with Shaun Early and Jack Hussar, we have some males in their late 20s or early 30s who formatively grew up on stuff like Project X and Superbad, and it shows.

LESSON #2: THE STATE OF SOPHOMORIC BEHAVIOR IN TEEN BOYS– Even so, this isn’t 2007 or even 2012 anymore for something like The Crusades. Frankly, there may not even be an ideal place in this current movie landscape for an acceptable and issue-free teen party movie. This is a social media-thickened 2023 in a post-#MeToo world of social emotional health considerations and large nullification efforts to stamp out toxic masculinity. Contrary to where The Crusades is coming from, “boys” shouldn’t be “boys” anymore without firm correction. 

Look at our three protagonists and the goals that power their arcs. Leo operates a completely false “stallion” aura of supreme confidence towards the opposite sex only to pine for one of his hot teachers (Anna Maiche of Tiny Pretty Things) and the heavily interested right girl for him his own age (Motherland: Fort Salem’s Ashley Nicole Williams). Sean and his brow-beating girlfriend (Indiana Massara of Chicken Girls) have circled the big weekend social as the night to finally lose their virginity for all the wrong reasons. Lastly, Jack is the protector of the group trying to thwart the straight-up assaults coming from the vaunted “Wrecking Crew” from St. Matthew’s (led by Blaine Maye of Joe Bell).

Sure, there fun to be had with all those possible intersections and hijinks laid out in The Crusades. Milano’s director of photography Dillon Schneider (Tunnel Vision) employs some slick camera placements and framing variety to soak in the debauchery. In addition, the musical energy from composer Kris Dirksen’s electronic score and the deep playlist of original songs by Evan Pinter and Jacob Schweitzer is huge. This movie is far from pulseless and scores some solid laughs as it swings unapologetically. 

LESSON #3: CONDONING SOPHOMORIC BEHAVIOR– Still, those character goals of The Crusades are in slightly antiquated “bros before hos” territory and hard to endorse. Once the big climactic party gets revved up, the film swerves to take on a thriller-ish vibe where it becomes more about our guys and gals evading the menacing bullies and brutal harm than the devil-may-care frivolity it started with. Granting some credit, the change in emphasis may count as Leo Milano (in his debut feature are short films) and company sobering up a bit to push out a more stark reality against all the bad behavior.

True to more than a few teen movie formulas, that only works for The Crusades if it trends towards making our ne'er-do-wells into better people by the end. When it’s all said and done, this movie is missing that reprisal of gained wisdom that sets our guys straighter. While it’s true not every teen boy is going to make serious strides automatically after a single weekend, but in The Crusades we’re left with the not-all-that-good guys versus the worser bullies scrambled in nonsense at the expense of female counterparts, any adults, dashes of common sense, and current modern maturity. That can be a rough hang. That’s a party you’ll enjoy only for so long before looking for the exit.