Bad Neighbours (or
just Neighbours in America) is a
comedy from Nicholas Stoller (Get Him to
the Greek, Yes Man) featuring Seth Rogen and Zac Efron. Mac (Rogen) and
Kelly (Rose Byrne) are a couple with a newborn baby who face a series of
increasingly irksome and embarrassing situations when a fraternity led by
no-nonsense student Teddy (Efron) moves in next door and initiates a
twenty-four hour, almost out of control party.
The most important thing about any comedy is that it has to
be funny, and I can’t deny that I did laugh about four or five times during the
film. The problem is that half of them I’d already seen in the trailer and the
others were crude gross-out humour. The rest of the comedy seems to follow what
I call the Hangover 2 principle: if
it was funny the first time, then do it again but louder and cruder.
Once that starts to collapse then it falls back on all the
usual staples of American comedies e.g. fat jokes, jokes about the Jewish,
penis jokes etc. Now while it’s true that these can be funny, after a while
they just feel horribly repetitive and just left me wanting something a bit
wittier than just having Christopher Mintz-Plasse make another joke about the
contents of his pants.
The problems are also present in the characters: Seth Rogen
(who I still haven’t forgiven for his involvement in the retrograde Superbad) is bland and uninteresting,
Rose Byrne frankly just looks happy to be working, but irritatingly, the scenes
between those two are at least bearable for some time. The fraternity itself is
horrific: like most modern teenagers in comedies, it consists almost entirely
of what appear to be female and male models wearing either no clothing or very
skimpy clothing, and a few ‘unattractive’ people to become the subject of the
jokes. Zac Efron – who actually has the ability to act – tries his best to hold
it all together but fails because he seems to have been cast purely to show off
his rippling torso.
The most irritating thing about the movie is that it’s quite
obviously been made to appeal to a ‘lad’ or ‘frat boy’ audience. It’s for
people whose idea of fun is being very loud, very drunk and probably high while
jumping around to pounding music…people who enjoy clubbing. As someone who (as
a first year university student) has experienced clubbing first hand I hate the
idea that it’s suddenly become glorified by movies. All the best movies about
it (Human Traffic, Trainspotting) show it for what it
really is: a confusing mess of bodies, light and sound. There is also liberal
use of female nudity during the party scenes and a woman-on woman kiss that has
been inserted purely to satisfy a male teenage audience.
Bad Neighbours is
a film which sadly scuppers its premise and comedy potential on a host of
gross-out gags and shouty humour, which even the charisma of Zac Efron can’t
save. Whilst I can’t deny that the rest of the audience (men and women in my
age group) did find it very funny, I put that down to an acceptance of sub-par,
leery laddy humour that has just become the norm. I think it’s about time Rogen
and his collaborators left films alone for a while and come back when they’ve
grown up a bit.
2 Stars
