On TV for three seasons, the British high-school buddy comedy “The Inbetweeners” was mere genius — each episode sharper, funnier and more dead-on than practically any teen comedy film I’ve ever seen. Also, it introduced a new catchphrase to the language, and we can all agree that English has been improved by the addition of the sobriquet (said of a nerd who dresses for school as though attending a board meeting) “briefcase wanker.”
Now there is an American, MTV version of the sitcom with the same title, and though anyone who doesn’t speak fluent Brit is going to be lost, the big-screen version of the British show is also here. (“The Inbetweeners” movie was the third biggest moneymaker in UK cinemas last year.)
Few are the movies I looked forward to as much as this one. Sadly, though, breaking free of the constraints of the small screen (even though the Brit TV show featured heavy profanity) has yielded a movie that’s slightly off. It turns out that constraint is really what the show is all about, or to put it another way, I’m disappointed that they turned my horny-teen comedy into a gross-out comedy.
Teen buddies Will (Simon Bird), Jay (James Buckley), Simon (Joe Thomas) and Neil (Blake Harrison) have graduated high school and set off for a vacation on Crete. As is ever the case, the pals seek to get as drunk as possible while chasing young lovelies. “We go straight out and get spasticated. Simples!” declares Jay, whose always-unwarranted optimism about his chances with girls makes him my favorite of the lot.
Will, a bespectacled dork, never has much of a chance to hook up (“You’re not normal, are you?” a girl asks him); while Simon, the most presentable of the four, has just been dumped by his girlfriend, Carly, and can’t stop talking about her. Jay continues to lie nonstop about his nonexistent conquests, while the large, kind-hearted, but dull-witted Neil vows to be chaste for his girlfriend back home.
As the four pursue some British girls they meet in a bar, the movie delivers lots of laughs, but the writers, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris (who did every episode of the TV show), employ a different tone than they did on TV. They abuse the R rating as though it were tequila shots. Instead of being pathetic, the boys are at times actually cruel. Instead of just lovingly flinging insults at one another, they get genuinely humiliated. Two people almost drown, three boys get publicly stripped naked and there are way too many scenes of Neil making out with 50-year-old slags. Also there is entirely too much vomit.
The movie is still painfully true in places, and warm-hearted in others. But in large part the TV show was funny because of its limits, the way the guys kept butting their heads against the dim parameters (parents, lack of adequate transportation, school) of middle-class suburban youth. The only real liberty they enjoyed was language, and their dialogue was a free-for-all of comic put-downs. Beesley and Morris know the true meaning of boyhood: having a group of cherished friends whom you can mock, scorn and belittle.