Meet Oliver (Seth Cassell), a 26-year old stone who epitomizes the loser stoner stereotype; he’s still living with his dad Jeff (Pete Gardner), also his employer, and can’t get along with Jeff’s smoking hot girlfriend Jennifer (Briana Lane), who despises Oliver’s predilection for cannabis. He even fails at basic tasks like washing cars or handing out flyers. His one defining characteristic, however, is that Oliver is well versed in weed and can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about this magical plant. Hence, the movie’s title: Oliver, Stoned.
Yet, despite his many failures, Jeff allows him one last chance to turn things around by giving him the task of picking up a 1950s classic Mercury vehicle, from a sexually active old lady, which is badly in need of some backseat upholstery work. But first – ice cream! When a belligerent ice cream truck driver informs Oliver that there is no way he has change for a fifty he heads into a convenient store to break the bill, only to discover upon returning the car is gone and the ice cream man has abandoned his truck. Oliver, genius as he is, decides to steal the ice cream truck to ride to his weed dealer Benson’s (Jim Mahoney) home.
Then – you guessed it – he crashes the truck into Benson’s neighbor’s scooter, which just happens to belong to barista Megan, who writes hardcore Veronica Mars fan-fiction on the side.
Things heat up when Megan, now scooterless, needs a ride to work, and enlists Oliver to give her one. This turns out to be yet another bad idea after Megan gets fired by her boss for being late for work. Now, with nothing left to do with her time, she agrees to help Oliver sell ice cream to make some money to help pay for her scooter. The newly formed group of Oliver, Megan, and Benson now embark on a boring and brainless quest to find this car. Funny.
What follows is another forgettable addition to the seedier, less funny stoner comedy sub-genre, the kind that only works if you’re completely and properly stoned to begin with. Unfortunately, for those of us who prefer watching in a less clouded state, this one lacks any subtlety whatsoever, trying too hard for laughs that should come easier given the material. It doesn’t help that Oliver is such an uninteresting lead that one can’t help but feel detached from the whole affair, lost in their own world, anxiously waiting for the credits to roll and this 90-minute misadventure of trite and unimaginative lameness to finally be over.
Oliver, Stoned barely passes as a stoner comedy, let alone regular entertainment. This is the type of movie you’d find in the megastore bargain bins, reduced for quick sale, or lazily filling up the blank spaces between better films on the Netflix rows. It’s mostly harmless, really, but it takes more than just easy pot-shots to make even a passable stoner comedy these days – pun certainly intended.
