First off, I confess that I’ve only put the spoiler warning in the title to err on the side of caution. However, I doubt this post will ruin things for you any more than any other review of this movie you might read.
It’s rare that a film is released in this country that is dependent so heavily on the UK box-office takings. The Inbetweeners Movie is something of an event over here, due to the popularity of the television sitcom. Its success thus far, has been limited to these shores, making any potential earnings elsewhere something of a bonus. And as I sat down, I wondered whether the film would stick to what had made it so successful in Britain, or would it make an active play to try and bring in viewers from the North American market?
Well, it was a bit of both, and it’s one of many things that makes The Inbetweeners Movie a disappoinment. Caught between two stalls, it falls short of repeating the quality of the sitcom, and probably doesn’t have enough to make people on the other side of The Atlantic care either. The story takes the four social duds – Will, Jay, Simon & Neil – out of suburbia, and to the Greek island of Malia, for a wild lads’ summer holiday. They have just finished school, and as many males of that age do, think that a hedonistic time in the sun is the perfect way to make the most of their new-found adulthood.
For those who had never seen the television version of the show, The Inbetweeners specialised in high farce; think Fawlty Towers with hormone-ridden teenage boys. This is a pattern that continues as the movie progresses. I think we all know what happens to the best laid plans. Well, it turns out that plans don’t have to be well laid to go horribly wrong. One of the best things about the show’s first two series’ was how reminiscent it was of so many males in their awkward teenage years. It avoided looking for the issues so often raised in fiction about young people. Shorn of sensationalist topics, such as drug abuse or teenage pregnancy made the tone of the show familiar to so many. Obviously you had to allow for a degree of comedic licence, but the fact is that most people don’t grow up as cool, or popular, or geeks, or outcasts. They’re just, “inbetween.”
Which makes the problems in the film all the more frustrating. The main one is the dialogue, which is simply appalling. Back in the early 90s, Quentin Tarantino bemoaned how he’d watched so many movies where the only purpose of dialogue was to advance the plot. This is fully in effect here. While there are some funny set-pieces, you still have to earn the right to make your audience laugh. Iain Morris & Damon Beesley’s screenplay is like a house without a solid foundation. Secondly, the film introduces four girls into the picture, whom the guys meet on holiday. Not only do they unimaginatively mirror their male counterparts, but they have no personality; this is not to denounce the four actresses, as their task was so thankless that I could feel little for them other than sympathy. To call them one-dimensional would be an overstatement.
One area of the film that I will defend is against accusations of homophobia or sexism. Yes, there are plenty of unsavoury terms used in the script. But it correlates accurately with the way many 18 year old boys talk, especially around each other. The movie doesn’t denounce or celebrate this – leaving it up to the audience to determine their own opinions – but it would be disingenuous not to include such coarse banter in the story. And to anyone who things that the film is sexist, I haven’t seen many movies with such an overbalance of nudity in favour of male flesh rather than female.
However, the film has proved a domestic box-office hit, and I only hope that tabloid clamours for a sequel are promptly silenced. This is definitely time to end the story of The Inbetweeners, as the movie has only continued the downward spiral in quality that was evident in Series 3. I only hope that time doesn’t sully what had been one of the better British sitcoms of recent years. What it did so well was look at how reluctant teenagers – particularly male teens – are to leave themselves bare and be “found out”. This a quality sadly lacking from the movie, and you’d probably be better off directing your attention to Submarine instead (which you can also find reviewed on Simply Read).
