New Years Rev is a film produced by Green Day and ticket Monopoly giant Live Nation that pretends to be punk rock. Instead, it comes across like a two hour version of the Steve Buscemi "how do you do, fellow kids" meme.

Green Day, as a band, are the source of both joy and problems for the film. By all accounts, they all seem like decent people who really want to do the right thing. Their music is catchy and fun, which is probably why it has played on mainstream radio so consistently for the past three decades.

But they're also an institution. They're not the outliers. They're not punks fighting against the machine. They are that machine. This entire film is a product they've put together with a multi-billion dollar corporation that's designed to create a myth about how down to earth they are.

By design, it's all kinds of gross, and it doesn't help the film is a poorly written mess filled with terrible acting and dated humor.

The setting is the midwest in the present day, though everyone behaves like it was the mid-90s. Our heroes are unlikable washouts from stable families in comfortable suburbia, who just hate how conformist everything is. Their rebellion is analog and anger, the language of Green Day, the most punk band of them all.

Sure, they've only got the one song, and it's not a very good one, either, and none of them seems to have a plan beyond talking about getting famous. But it doesn't matter, because nobody else gets it. Whatever "it" actually is.

When the older brother of the lead singer (Mason Thames) plays a prank on the band by pretending to be Mike Dirnt of Green Day and inviting them to open the New Years Rev show in Los Angeles, the Analog Dogs steal a car and set off for adventure.

Of course, in a world where everyone has a smartphone and an internet connection, it would take two seconds to check whether or not this was legit. The movie makes a vague attempt at waving this off by suggesting the leads are just too stupid to understand technology, but it's more of a case that the script doesn't work if the rest of the world doesn't along with the fantasy. No matter where our heroes go, everyone is a Green Day fan. The mere mention of the band stops entire rooms in in their tracks so that people can admire the mere presence of someone opening for them.

What follows is a journey through every single teen road movie from the early 2000s, complete with every cliche and ugly stereotype from that time. This is a movie that would have been dated by the time Green Day first hit big. Today, it feels downright archaic.

It isn't smart, it's not clever, and it doesn't have the kind of heart to cover up for the lack of either. Instead, it just feels downright mean. As if we're not supposed to like any of the lead characters, but because they've got the blessings of Green Day, it's just who we're stuck with.

Green Day fans will enjoy the constant needle drops to the biggest hits, and there's a singular funny bit involving Jenna Fischer that almost, almost makes the film worthwhile. But it's hopelessly long, poorly paced, and so insistent that it's doing something radical by making the most pedestrian and safe product imaginable that all of it ends up feeling noxious.

To use a dated reference, it's the Hot Topic of punk rock movies.