Chris At The Pictures

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