Pizza Movie Movie Review (2026)
A surreal comedy about two college students trying to retrieve a pizza while navigating increasingly absurd drug hallucinations, Pizza Movie is hilarious at first, though its escalating weirdness becomes more exhausting than entertaining.
The first time I saw the trailer for this movie, I had a little laugh with my family. The two stars, Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone, are very familiar to us. I am too much of a scaredy cat to watch Stranger Things, so I know Matarazzo from the one scene in the show where he sings “Never Ending Story” (a movie that I love) and his Broadway turn as Tobias Ragg in Sweeney Todd. And having watched The Goldbergs for years and compared their family to our own extended family, Giambrone will always be Adam Goldberg to us.
Pizza Movie is about Jack and Montgomery, college dorm roommates who are awkward and picked on by the “cool kids.” One night, they discover a tin of mints on their desk and find that there are old drugs inside. With a little of Jack’s peer pressure, they each take a pill, only to discover that there are rules to these drugs. If they don’t eat something, there will be one last horrible stage among the various other stages of the trip. They then spend the rest of the night trying to collect their pizza from the lobby.
I wanted to like this movie. I was excited, the original trailer piqued my interest, and I love a good comedy. I have found stoner movies a little hit-or-miss (Never Goin’ Back was awful, but Harold and Kumar is hilarious), but I had high hopes.
The first half hour cracked me up. The situational comedy was on point, the timing was great, and the introduction to the characters was amusing. But then it lost its way.
Once the boys take the pills, things begin to feel understandably frenetic. Random situations and hallucinations are flying at them left and right. It’s very funny at first. I laughed out loud. There’s a great nod to Stephen Sondheim (who wrote Sweeney Todd, which Matarazzo starred in). But the absurdist comedy slowly morphs into a kind of unpredictable chaos that both makes no sense (not a bad thing in itself) and grows increasingly unfocused.
Pizza Movie takes place in stages of hallucination, with the guys discovering things about the girls they like or the pizza delivery robot along the way. But it starts to feel as if the writers have thrown everything at the wall to see what might stick, and no one has told them it was too much.
In the end, Pizza Movie feels like an overstuffed film that meanders, hoping to find a comedy win. What could have been a comedic fever-dream became an uneven, repetitive movie that just makes you want the trip to be over. It’s a bummer.
Runtime: 97 minutes
Motion Picture Rating: R
Languages Spoken In The Film: English
Should You Watch It? No
Did I Cry? Nope
My Rating: 2.25/5 Stars
Available: Free on Hulu
