'The Inbetweeners 2' - Review

Following the events of 2011’s surprise smash hit, The Inbetweeners 2 travels across the globe to Australia as Will, Neil and Simon – desperate to escape psychotic girlfriend Lucy (Tamla Kari) – go off in search of best friend Jay. In the attempt to get the gang back together, the group encounter a troupe of gap year travellers, Jay’s foul-mouthed Australian relatives and the treacherous landscape of the outback.

As someone who really enjoyed the TV series and subsequent film continuation, I had a lot of good feelings going into the latest instalment, and to some extent they were warranted. The film is funny, and I think you’d have to be quite stoically grumpy to not laugh at least twice, because there are set-pieces that just work. Without wishing to spoil it but whilst letting you know what you’re in for, the biggest laughs involve the combination of Neil’s irritable bowel and a waterslide, plus a sequence featuring Roberta Flack’s ‘The First Time I Saw Your Face’. There is also a recurring gag about the pretentious attitudes of gap year travellers that raised a lot of mirth from the rather small audience in the showing I attended.

What I also noticed in said showing is that there were noticeable dry spells between comedic set-pieces in which there didn’t appear to be much laughter from either myself or the rest of the audience, which in a teen sex-comedy is a problem, considering the fits of laughter that my friends and I emitted while watching the original series. There is also the issue that the satirical sexism – used in the show to establish caricatures of male British teenagers – is now wearing quite thin and doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, particularly considering the fact that there aren’t a great deal of female roles in the film other than pre-established characters or ‘the girl Will wants to get with’ or ‘the obsessed girlfriend’.

Due to the unforeseen success of the first movie, the sequel has a far bigger budget (hence the move to Australia) which leads to a much more extravagant sensibility, notably the opening titles and a hideously over-long and gratuitous scene in which Jay describes the life he is supposedly living on the Aussie coast. But once the budget is stripped back and we are just left with the four leads alone in the outback, the film begins to really work; the spirit of the series emerges and is retained until the very end. So while the success of the first film has been a detriment to this one, it has also taught the film-makers that a nippy, hour and-a-half running time prevents stagnant gaps between laughter (although there is one or two).

As a swansong to the series and a farewell to the four leads, The Inbetweeners 2 functions perfectly well, and while somewhat lacklustre in the comedy department in comparison to the much funnier first instalment, fans of the show should not be disappointed. It may be messy, irritating at points and relentlessly foul-mouthed, so as a cinematic version of the eponymous four it’s a resounding success.

3 stars