Going into it, I considered that this may be my most embarrassing review ever. And if you’ve been reading this for any amount of time, you know that’s saying kind of a lot. It’s like, The Real World, right? Sort of the first big reality TV show, took over MTV and removed all hope of music videos ever gracing those airwaves again? Yeah, that. Some years later, they decided, hey, what if we made a movie about these kinds of people going to Cancun for Spring Break and getting nakeder than MTV generally approves of since the early ’80s? And then they did so.

And, y’know, The Real Cancun really is about what you’d expect. It’s like, let’s take a whole bunch of college age students, give them way more than they can afford, and let them do random stuff. In the Real World, that turns into weeks of annoying drama interspersed by fake community service work, or maybe that stuff like happens on Donald Trump’s show? The point here, is that I don’t really watch much reality TV and have no clear idea what happens except what I’ve tried to ignore while others were watching. But it turns out that if you reduce the time they spend together to just a week or so, put them into lots of wet t-shirt contests (and beefcake contests, to be fair), and (especially this one) change the show’s duration from weeks of 23 minutes down to about 90 total, it’s a lot more palatable. I, ever so slightly, cared about what happened to these characters.