Film: The Inbetweeners

Director: Ben Palmer
Genre: Comedy 
Source: UK (2011)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Netflix Streaming
Grade: C-

I have a soft spot for the British sit-com The Inbetweeners. My friend Dylan and I found it on tv one day and watched a few episodes. It's childish, crude, offensive, misogynistic, and often very very funny. I ended up watching the whole series at the gym, and I gained an affection for all four of the characters, even though I couldn't off the top of my head tell you any of their names.

Like many of my favorite recent comedy tv shows (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Workaholics), the show works because 90% of the time the lead characters are the objects of ridicule. They are idiots, they are clearly out-of-touch, and yet they are so confident and brazen about the whole thing that you can't help but like them. The misogyny, for example, is used to mock the misogyny of adolescent boys: obsession with women as objects prevents them from ever gaining relationships with any real women. Their childish obsession with female body parts is exactly what prevents them from getting closer to female body parts; they see women as a goal, rather than as people. Their idiocy is meant to be recognized, but it's also meant to be laughed at, with the hope that the audience recognizes that women are more than the sum of a few parts.

Perhaps that's giving the show too much credit, though. In this film, while the four boys are on vacation, they are repeatedly cruel, rude, and piggish to a set of four women they befriend, and yet somehow the women keep coming back for more--well before the boys have learned any sort of lesson. The fact that all four of the girls seem to give all four of the boys chance after chance undercuts any real social commentary and basically affirms a message that women are just waiting to throw themselves at boys, no matter how they really treat them. 

These competing messages just end up leaving the film as a British version of a teen sex comedy like American Pie--all surface, no substance, and tons of penis jokes.

Don't get me wrong. A few of the jokes made me laugh. But ultimately this was pretty forgettable. 

Neil. Neil is the tall goofy one. There, I knew I could do it.

Alternate Movie Title: "And You Thought the TV Show Was Dirty . . ."