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 As someone who lives in Pittsburgh I have time and time again had my interest, or lack thereof, questioned in terms of local artists, events, foods and beverages. There have been far too many times that a person will say to me “what do you mean you don’t listen Christina Aguilera? You’re from Pittsburgh” or “how can you say that Iron City Beer is terrible? You’re from Pittsburgh.” People seem willing to assume that just because I hail from the same place as something I will ignore how bad that thing is and fall in love with it because it came from near where I do. Unfortunately for Christina, Iron City and now the “comedy” movie Adventureland, that is something I am simply not willing to do.
 Filmed at Pittsburgh’s Kennywood Park and starring Jesse Eisenberg Adventureland tells the story of James, a college graduate who takes a summer job in the games department at a local amusement park called Adventureland because he can’t afford to go on a European vacation with his friends. The rest of the movie from that point can be summed up as follows: James meets Em (Kristen Stewart from the Twilight series) and is immediately attracted to her. Unfortunately she is romantically involved with Mike Connell, a park maintenance man played by Ryan Reynolds and James is extremely awkward around women. They hang out every now and then but nothing happens because Em has “a lot of problems” in her life. James finds out about Mike and goes on a date with Sarah, another park employee, which makes Em jealous. But before she can break things off with Mike, James confronts her and they have a little argument. Then, Em has to go back to New York where she goes to school and where James was supposed to go to school too until his friend dropped out on him. In the end he decides to go to New York anyway and surprise/apologize to Em. Now you may be asking yourself “what’s funny about that? Isn’t this about a comedic movie? There is so much comedic potential in a movie about kids working at an amusement park, is it possible that all that potential material was neglected?” The answers to those questions are: ‘nothing’, ‘yes, technically’ and ‘yes.’ Despite the presence of Saturday Night Live actors Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as park supervisors, both of whom are typically funny, this film is not funny. Not only that, it’s not even entertaining in any way. There were maybe – and I stress the word maybe – a handful of slightly humorous lines and the rest were boredom inducing chatter. I actually worked at Kennywood and gladly would have provided anecdotes if the writers had asked me to when they realized they had uninteresting subject matter. Unfortunately they never asked and thus were left with a substandard production. I’ll give it a JACK but only because it doesn’t deserve to be in the same category as the second Transformers movie.
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