Bad Neighbours 2 (2016)

Or “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising″, as it apparently launched abroad. 

Continuing my Zac Efron Garbage Reviews. Thankfully Neighbours 2 does their light, low-thought thing without always caving to the lowest common denominator. It lands some solid jokes as well as some ridiculously silly ones, and that’s totally fine, because it’s not also being bland and aggressively horrible the whole time. Female characters are allowed to be gross, but they’re also allowed to be funny and smart and kind of awful and it’s all mostly balanced out. The cast were great together and with a couple of exceptions it was good performances all round (I thought Chloe Grace Moretz was the weak link, which was rough with her in the main role). I don’t think it talked too far down at young women either, which is a risk with the subject matter. It basically follows a new sorority next door to the couple from the last movie - the too-good-for-this Rose Byrne and the exactly-right-for-this Seth Rogen - and their over-the-fence war while they get lost in their quest to create a sorority that subverts the sexist norms. Also, Zac Efron's back. So there's the thing that links this with that Mike and Dave movie I put myself through.

Look, my friend saw this and then at a dinner said to me that I'm “always saying that [I] hate men, [I]’ll probably like it”. She laughed at the ridiculousness of feminism as a justification for extreme behaviour, I laughed because she’s right, I do hate men as an institution, and this movie highlighted a lot of the comedy in some of those systemic imbalances.

This is far from a perfect movie. It's far from a great movie! It’s definitely confused in the multiple attempts at social critique. There are lots of attempts to make some comments on feminism, and some of them land while others kind of just…wander around the point. I did also at times find their determination to keep trying to hammer those points home kind of frustrating. The jokes were wildly hit and miss. It’s not a movie I would make it a priority to see straight away, but it’s an alright time killer and it’s a good girls night in or aeroplane movie. Basically: Fun Garbage, and especially successful at that when compared to the last Zac Efron trashbag I watched.

Rating: 5/10