The Inbetweeners Movie Review

It's ungraceful and at times it certainly isn’t pretty, but if you were a fan of the series, or if you just love faecal matter and penis jokes, you’ll probably enjoy the movie spin off of this somewhat popular British television series. Otherwise, I’d steer well clear.

I’m not sure how I feel about the inbetweeners television series. At first I was rather a large fan, enjoying the first series rather a lot. From the heights of the first series though, as with many television series', the creativity of the story lines waned as it progressed and , to my mind at least, there seemed to be a reliance upon increasing crudeness to get laughs (an ever increasing use of slang descriptions of ladies for example), rather than through interesting story lines. To me, then, the film is a pinnacle of this transition, swapping out the interesting and sometimes cleverly written episodes of the first series, with a story line that is probably as bog standard as you can possibly get, but one where the rude jokes are almost always present. I’m not saying that I’m against this, and sure I did laugh rather more than I was expecting, but really beyond these moments there were many others which had me cringing, not because of the constant references to private parts, but instead because the character interaction, dialogue and plotting was so mind numbingly dull, clichéd and in many points arbitrarily enforced.

As with the television series, the film follows Will McKenzie (Simon Bird) and his three friends, Simon Cooper (Joe Thomas), Jay Cartwright (James Buckley) and Neil Sutherland (Blake Harrison) and pretty much leads directly off from the last episode of the television series which saw the four friends preparing to leave college to university or the big wide world (though quickly dismissing some plot points which were central to the last series but obviously didn’t fit with the plot of the film – the fact that Simon was to move to Wales with his family for instance). With this big life move in sight, the 4 friends decide to go on holiday together to Greece to get ‘knee deep in clunge’. As with the series, the sometimes over stereotyped characters remain pretty much the same within the film, Will is still the awkward geek, Simon remains obsessed with Carli, Jay remains to be obsessed with sex (though obviously not actually getting any) and any sort of slang epithet he can think of to describe this and Neil remains the gormless yet happy idiot that he always was in the series.

Once they arrive in Greece things get rather predictable very fast and in essence the film boils down to the simple premise of initial fun, followed by internal strife, ending with eventual reconciliation, none of which is ever portrayed in a way that is really that interesting in story terms, but is at times funny, which seems to have been the only real aim.

After some initial high jinks, the party soon meet a group of ladies also on holiday from England and it is the relationship between these young ladies and our group that forms the crux of the film. First you have the relationship between Will and Alison (Laura Hoddock), whose greek boyfriend is preventing them from getting properly close (guess what happens here), then you have Simon and Lucy, whose relationship is thwarted by the fact that Carli is also on holiday at the same resort and the obsessed Simon obviously can’t see whats right in front of him (guess what happens here also), then you have Jay and Jane (Lydia Rose Bewley) whose relationship is thwarted by the fact that Jane is a larger girl, yeah, the story lines are that intense. These relationships develop (I use that term very uselessly) to a predictable finale.

I don’t want to be purely negative about my experience watching the inbetweeners. I certainly did laugh a large number of times, either through the sure absurdity of a situation, the crudeness of a joke or situation or through the few moments of clever timing and writing (those these were certainly fewer than the jokes that relied solely upon crudity). If you were out only for a bit of a laugh with no consideration for any other aspect of a film, you’d probably enjoy this as just a throw away piece of fun. When I wasn’t laughing, I was cringing though. Many jokes just fall flat, and there are points in the film that just feel devoid of content, where I was even wishing that they would throw in another poo joke just to get away from the awkward and poorly acted sections where the film gets serious (or as serious as is possible) and attempts to create some kind of emotion connection or build relations between characters; none of these felt in any way satisfying, with some of the decisions of the characters seemingly totally bizarre, only obviously present to push the story in a certain direction.

In the end, there are probably a number of opportunities where the film makers could have pushed the film into an interesting direction, but instead they seemed to have chosen the easy, heavily clichéd path, avoiding clever writing and situational comedy for a quick dick joke, which I guess is what those who continued to watch the TV series obviously wanted. I didn’t have a bad time with the inbetweeners Movie, and in parts I enjoyed it, but overall, it was lacking, reminding me of a particular film named Kevin and Perry Go Large, which I assure you, is never a good comparison to make.