Plenty of flicks and TV shows have presented a funhouse mirror tackle the highschool experience, from the controversial “Heathers” and “Mean Girls” to Amy Sedaris’ subversive series “Strangers With Candy.”
The brand new Orion comedy “Bottoms,” like a teen outcast staring longingly at the favored table, desperately wants to affix that messed-up catalog of classics.
Running time: 92 minutes. Rated R (crude sexual content, pervasive language and a few violence). In theaters.
Its weirdness suits the bill. Director Emma Seligman’s movie abounds with gruesome violence, explosions and bone-dry barbs about suicide.
But while the off-kilter film is a high quality showcase for the personalities of two of our greatest emerging comedic stars, Rachel Sennott (“Shiva Baby”) and Ayo Edebiri (“The Bear”), the humor falls in need of being very funny.
Considering the talent of those involved, I laughed lots lower than I expected to.
Sure, shocking comments are abruptly made again and again, comparable to the cruel school principal calling the “talentless gays” all the way down to his office on the intercom.
Nevertheless, the jokes don’t land within the deliciously jarring way that makes us howl uncontrollably on the inappropriate. They simply form of occur, and we move on to the following should-be outrageous line.
What works best with “Bottoms,” though, is that it never settles for being the movie you’re thinking that it’s going to be. It’s its own unique, amorphous thing.
The film starts out, we consider, as an “American Pie” sex romp, with abrasive PJ (Sennott) and quiet Josie (Edebiri) desperately wanting to get with their respective crushes, Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), before graduation.
The plot quickly takes a tough turn toward Crazytown.
Their warped plan? After Brittany is threatened by her unhinged football player boyfriend Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), Josie and PJ determine to begin an all-women self-defense club to show their friends the way to fight. Isabel and Brittany, a part of the cafeteria A-list, will certainly enroll.
Then, the story darkens — and becomes angrier and unsparingly harsh. Despite not knowing anything about combat, PJ and Josie earn the respect of their fellow students by lying about how they killed people in juvy. (They were never even locked up, let alone murderers.)
So the impressed girls take their instruction and bash each others’ faces and kick with abandon. By this point, we don’t consider much of the wackiness that’s happening. We’re likely not purported to.
Edebiri and Sennott bring the comedy styles they’re best known for. Sennott blows up her Gen Z brazenness that was a riot in last 12 months’s “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies” and Edebiri’s levelheaded deliveries make essentially the most insane ideas sound totally logical and reasonable. The 2 make perfect foils.
And good for Galitzine, who used to star in terrible movies like “Cinderella” with Camila Cabello, for finally showing different sides of his skill set. As a jock bully, he’s practically Biff from “Back to the Future.” This performance comes just two weeks after his polar opposite romantic comedy “Red, White & Royal Blue,” during which he played the prickly prince of England.
Most enjoyable in “Bottoms” aren’t the high schoolers, though, however the silly adults around them. Their unwilling club adviser, Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch), overshares about his divorce and feelings toward women. And PJ and Josie’s old babysitter, Rhodes (Punkie Johnson), smokes cigars outside her trailer and doles out questionable advice.
The finale — an annual football game against rival Huntington — is taken to wild extremes. Blood is shed, people die and pineapple juice plays an important role.
It’s kooky and committed. But, sigh, it’s just not all that funny.
