The fratty comedy “Neighbors” seems to have originated in a butcher shop: It stars a slab of beef and features a whole lot of sausage jokes. To me it looks like a turkey, but it seems poised to bring home the bacon.
Zac Efron has been to the gym and is very eager to show us. He has more difficulty keeping his top on than a bottle of Bud Light at a frat rager — such as the ones he presides over as president of Delta Psi Beta, which moves in next door to the suburban house of two newbie homeowners (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) and their baby daughter.
“Neighbors” has some interesting ideas but throws them away in favor of a string of pasted-together jokes about sex and bodily fluids. In a pinch, the story stops to invite the actors to wheel out celebrity impressions or simply has Efron get hit in the head with a flying beer can or a professor be nearly crushed by a bouncing oil drum.
Mac (Rogen) is an office drone who at first tries to be friends with next-door frat brothers Teddy (Efron) and his deputy Pete (Dave Franco). There’s real potential for an insightful, character-based comedy about how 30-year-olds think of themselves as young but seem like old people to college students. That Mac thinks of himself as cool is an interesting, “Old School”-style update to the old formula about starched shirts vs. wild boys, the theme of the unrelated 1981 John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd comedy that was also called “Neighbors.”
But the sloppy, intermittently funny script by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien barely bothers with motivation or connecting story beats. Why do the police suddenly turn on Mac when he’s justified in calling them after the frat brothers ignore 10 phone calls and carry on loudly at 4 a.m.? Why does Kelly (Byrne) think she can make one Greek’s girlfriend cheat on him simply by shoving the girl’s face up against another guy’s? Can a frat really make a fortune selling sex toys based on molds taken of its own, er, members?
Never mind, as the neighbors go to war with each other the point is it would be awkward if a bunch of college students pressed their faces to your window while you were having sex on the couch. The screenwriters are taking a chance here: They’re hoping you’ve never heard of curtains.
The movie’s must-see gags (I say grudgingly) are a contrived one about Mac squeezing the milk out of his nursing wife and another one about stolen airbags being used as nuclear whoopee cushions, but I aged out of fascination with gross-out gags around middle school. And the airbags? Inventive, but mere slapstick. Far more appealing — comedy works when you’re nodding as you laugh — is a conversation Mac and Kelly have about the (lame) pleasures of aging. “I love going to the Container Store and buying containers!” she confesses.
A central problem: Efron isn’t funny. Once adorable, he’s now determined to show us how glowering and grown-up and not-at-all Disney he is. He’s not an actor, he’s a porterhouse. At the end, when his character realizes his destiny and attains the job of shirtless guy outside Abercrombie store, the scene is stuck for an idea until Rogen shows up and takes his shirt off too. Rogen’s blubber dance is pretty much gold, but I expect more from one of his generation’s leading comics than making his lard jiggle.