The Inbetweeners 2 is crass, crude and monumentally unfunny

THERE was a time, not long ago, when gross-out comedy could be genuinely fun, but the British film Inbetweeners 2 is beyond tasteless.

Four British teenagers visit Australia in The Inbetweeners 2; from left, Joe Thomas (as Simon), Simon Bird (as Will), James Buckley (as Jay) and Blake Harrison (as Neil).

IT began as a popular British TV sitcom and became The Inbetweeners Movie, the highest grossing comedy in UK box-office history, in 2011. You don’t believe it? Neither do I, but I’m quoting from the usual studio blurbs, dodgy websites and other handouts. Such claims rarely bare close examination. My doubts were reinforced when I read that The Inbetweeners 2 had surpassed the record of its predecessor and enjoyed the highest grossing opening week of any film in Britain this year. Not only that, English critics had given it a generally positive reception.

I don’t believe that either. Perhaps there’s no accounting for British taste. But when speaking of The Inbetweeners 2, taste is hardly the word. Tasteless is hardly the word. This film is beyond tasteless. I rate it the most crass, crude and monumentally unfunny comedy since — when? I can’t remember. And it’s only the second film in the series. As a general rule, the higher the number in a film’s title the worse the film is likely to be. On this scale, you’d expect this film to be called The Inbetweeners 7, or possibly something in double figures. I hope I’m making the point that it’s a bloody awful movie.

Written and directed by Damon Beesley and Iain Morris (who devised the original sitcom), it’s about four lusty 18-year-old English lads who embark on a madcap holiday in Australia. In the first film they took themselves to Greece, with the aim of sowing their wild oats and generally behaving like drunken slobs for the delight of the local population. Having now set their sights on Australia, are they any older and wiser? You wish.

There was a time, not long ago, when gross-out comedy could be genuinely funny. Gross comedy became the norm for many Hollywood producers. American director John Waters, who made the pursuit of tastelessness an art form, enjoyed more or less complete freedom to shock and offend after the collapse of Hollywood’s notorious production code in the 1960s. His infamous Pink Flamingos (1972) included among its outrageous pleasures the spectacle of a character eating dog excrement. Bodily fluids and functions were highlights of the Farrelly brothers’ oeuvre (There’s Something About Mary) and the raunchy teen comedy American Pie, whose account of four high school boys vowing to lose their virginity may have partly inspired The Inbetweeners. Menstrual fluid made its mark in Superbad, and projectile vomiting enjoyed a brief vogue in National Lampoon’s Animal House. Hollywood came up with an X-rated cartoon character in Fritz the Cat, but the first on-screen depiction of explicit human sex is credited, suitably enough, to the French, with Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999). Even the Brits scored a hit in 1997 with The Full Monty, in which a bunch of male strippers get their gear off. You wouldn’t call it a gross-out comedy, but I’m told it was the highest grossing comedy in Britain that year.

In The Inbetweeners 2, our four lads are Will (Simon Bird), Jay (James Buckley), Neil (Blake Harrison) and Simon (Joe Thomas), all reprising their original roles. I think each is meant to have his own quirky personality, but to me they seemed depressing alike in their attitudes and appetites, with racist sympathies and a cheerful philistinism on show from the start. Arriving in Sydney, they quickly become familiar with everyday Aussie slang terms (“bonzer”, “you f..king drongo”) and are soon contemplating a glorious moonlit vista of Sydney Harbour (“What the f..k’s that?” asks Will on seeing the Opera House for the first time).

I would have liked to have seen more of the boys among familiar Sydney landmarks, but then it’s only fair to include Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and even Canberra landmarks — a tall order in 96 minutes (though it seems much longer while we’re watching).

After a brief sequence in Byron Bay the lads head for a Gold Coast resort. Jay promises no shortage of female company. Aussie chicks just can’t get enough, he reckons — having already made the acquaintance of Elle Macpherson and Dame Edna Everage. Matters are complicated when Will meets Katie (Emily Berrington), an old chum from England, who persuades the boys to join her. Simon, meanwhile, is trying to break up with Lucy, his girlfriend in Bristol, but during a Skype conversation she mistakes a chance remark from Will’s uncle as a marriage proposal from Will. A clever touch this, so don’t say I’m not being fair. And, to be even fairer, I should add that a lot of the audience at my screening were laughing their heads off.

With much hilarious material to choose from, viewers will have a hard time picking their favourite funny sequence. How about the scene when Will is pursued through a waterslide by a flotilla of turds, a consequence of Neil’s irritable bowel syndrome? Or that pedophile joke when Jay pushes Simon into a pool and he lands in a compromising position on top of a young boy? Animal lovers may prefer the scene when a dog licks a bloke’s dangling balls in full view of the camera, or when Neil feeds fast food to an unsuspecting dolphin and the poor creature breathes its last. Then there’s all that business on the Birdsville Track, when the lads run out of petrol and imagine they are dying of thirst. The only source of life-saving fluid is Neil’s full bladder. And how refreshing is that?

The dialogue is relentlessly fast but never funny, unless you consider four-letter words funny in themselves. After their Australian holiday, the lads are off to Vietnam, a country that surely has suffered enough already from foreign intruders. Yes, it’s a bloody awful film, and by giving it more space than it deserves I run the risk of encouraging the gullible, the curious and the prurient to see it for themselves. Well, good luck to you all, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Inbetweeners 2 (MA15+)

1 star

National release