Simple, lazy, great
An Immature Critic is won over by the biggest comedy of the summer
The Americans are really good at it. American Pie, Dude, Where’s My Car?, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The Brits tried it once – Kevin & Perry Go Large. And then four pubescent, awkward, goofy, and weird teenagers popped onto the scene to deliver the summer’s funniest movie.
Just like you Freshers, they have just spent their last summer together, having finished school for good. And so they trotted off on a Mediterranean jolly with plenty of high hopes for some of that elusive minge. As they put it, “it’ll be like shooting clunge in a barrel”. The Inbetweeners Movie is, as the name suggests, the movie version of the much loved TV sitcom series.
The film follows the bog standard ship-the-tv-series-guys-on-a-long-holiday-in-a-foreign-country format with plenty of boobs, vomit, and embarrassing situations. It’s a simple, lazy format. You know what you’re getting beforehand. But sometimes that’s enough. You know what you want, and you get what you want. The crude, crass jokes are aimed at our lowest, most basic level of humour and are very fond of willies, poo, and hard-ons.
Much has been made of the film’s similarities and differences to Harry Enfield’s Kevin & Perry Go Large, which at the time of its release was badly received by the critics. The problem is that these films haven’t been made to be clever, observant, well-written, or judged by monocle-wearing hacks. They are made to tickle our inner child, our core which will always remain the same whether we become dull, functional academics or even duller, more functional accountants. How can you critically acclaim one teen comedy and then trash another? They’re all junk. They’re a basic recipe, like The X Factor or The Only Way is Essex.
Yes, it’s a cheap movie, a shameless milking of the cash-cow before Simon Bird and Co. get too old. But in a summer of regurgitated super-hero garbage (X-Men: First Class, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, Green Lantern, and at least 5 others I can’t remember or will be coming out in due course) The Inbetweeners Movie was the best picture around, a welcome respite.
Everyone has a genre of harmless faeces they enjoy watching. Romantic comedies, cheap action thrillers, gory horror flicks, Pixar animations, and pseudo-pretentious art house numbers. À chacun son goût. Movies where immature kids do a number two in the bidet and the bad guy gets a poo on his nose are mine.
