'Good Boys'? More like 'Bad Film'.

Aside from maybe 3 enjoyable 2 minute scenes and 3 chuckles being gained from them, Good Boys is one of the most thoroughly unenjoyable films I've ever seen. In film, there isn't anything much worse than a bad comedy. You can ironically enjoy a bad movie and be entertained from all the intended themes/acting chops/lines being butchered, but a film that intentionally tries to make you laugh and fails miserably then leaves you feeling sticky and uncomfortable. A bit rich coming from me if YOU don't think I'M remotely funny, but eh, this is just my opinion. And the horrible thing is that, unlike most other genres of film, comedies are perhaps the MOST subjective. I mean even in the previous sentence I brought forward the potential hypocrisy of me judging a comedy if YOU personally think I'm worse than the comedy in this film. You can't help whatever makes you laugh and what sense of humour you have, and so when I say this film is hot trash, it probably wasn't to you - and that is more than okay. I loved Sausage Party, and others didn't. But what I like to think is that I disliked the film more on technical aspects to do with how to make a comedy film, and of course, more importantly - how I, as a parent of 3 kids (1 of which has been through the ages of these boys and 1 currently in the age range) can relate to the comedy and the intelligence behind the writing. I'm sure a defense for the film against what I didn't like would be that it's deliberately exaggerated (the kids behaving like dickhead jock adults), but when this deliberate exaggeration is ALL the film has going for it, and it cuts back and forth between sympathetic childishness and exaggerated grossness as graceful as an angry honey-badger, you're messing something up.

Anyway, the plot is as follows; you've got 3 12-year-old kids who are just starting big boys school and for some reason are utterly obsessed with talking about sex. They are invited to a kissing party, but don't know how to kiss, so they steal the main character's dad's work drone in order to spy on some girls next door. They lose the drone and get it confiscated by the girls, meaning they have to jump through many funny hoops in order to get the drone back, including trying to buy another at a mall, and even smuggle drugs to the girls as a trade-off. The issue I have with the setup is because, well, the setup SETS UP the tone of the film and how smart it could potentially be, especially in a comedy where the jokes need natural flow and have a solid foundation to the punchline (yes, even in juvenile comedies dealing with sex and gross out stuff [see Sausage Party and South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut). But the setup for this film is a contrived mess, which then leads to every single gag being a contrived mess. To give you a simpler idea - the kids don't know how to kiss, so then decide to search up porn online to see how it's done. Okay, decently funny I guess, but when you then realise their next logical solution is to spy on the neighbours with a drone (which doesn't even guarantee they'll see a kiss anyway) instead of simply searching on YouTube 'how to kiss', it just makes them break their characters (they are NOT stupid in this film, just misunderstood) for the sake of the ENTIRE plot existing in the first place. They can use a fucking drone, and search for porn on a porn website, but don't think to google 'how to kiss'. Think about it. Also, side-note, they also don’t know what tampons are. I'm sorry, for a cheap gag or not, that is the most unbelievable thing I've seen from a 12-year-old, and once again contradicts their characters and tries to make the audience go 'DUUUH THE KIDS ARE TALKING ABOUT TAMPONS' in order to disguise the laziness of the joke. It happens lots more, as well - with how they treat road safety by just blindly running into a highway (while making sure to pick up dropped items), and how they attempt shoplifting with a police officer standing right in front of them. If they entire film was centered around how stupid the kids were, it'd be fine, but Good Boys wants to have its cake and eat it too. They're smart enough to do all the ridiculous things in the film (including fixing a dislocated arm, holding drug dealers up at gunpoint with paintball guns, using a drone etc), but are too dumb to research 'how to kiss' in order to fix their problem in a matter of seconds. And dumb enough to do everything else I mentioned.

This all together wouldn't be so awful, but where Good Boys really drops everything is with how utterly unlikeable the main characters are. They're aggressive, squeaky-voiced asshole kids trying desperately to be cool, and the older I've gotten, the more I realise that trope is just bloody horrible for main characters we're supposed to sympathise with. Especially problematic when this comedy film only runs with 2 gags for these characters (not the situations, but the characters themselves) - they think they’re edgy adults by swearing in every other sentence, and they don’t understand sex. That’s it from beginning to end, with no deviation. When there isn't some grandiose action scene taking place and the characters need to talk to each other to develop, move the plot along, or provide any kind of bridging laughs in between the occasional chaotic moment, the characters just remind us that they can say 'fuck'. And that they don't get sex. But don't you understand? They WANT to have girlfriends! But they don't get them! Isn't that amusing? Yeah, that's it for the entire movie. You wanna see how to do this kind of coming-of-age character arc thing brilliantly? Stranger Things. All roughly the same age at the time Season 1 started, the kids in Stranger Things are the core focus of the show (much like the kids in this film), and yes; they have flaws, they try to get away with swearing and being edgy, they don't understand romance, they're still learning and growing up naturally - it ALL works a million times better. It feels more authentic, the lines are funnier because they work within the character relationships, they're immensely more likable as human beings and it feels like they were written by actual parents that have experienced more realistic situations between how that age group react off each other and deal with puberty. Because of that, it's smarter, more relatable, and at least to me - more funny when those more comedic moments appear (because you are more sympathetic to their cause and YOU CARE). And that's in a show with an extradimensional spider trying to murder everyone with alien dogs. Not to mention, the acting is miles over anything in Good Boys; with our main character unable to decide what the hell to do with his face in every scene, looking in the wrong places constantly, and whenever the film needs to go 'serious' for a second? Christ, we'll get to that in a second.

This isn’t a dedicated coming of age story, either. There’s no transitional struggle between childhood and becoming a teenager, and no jokes centered around this theme at all. If there is, it’s picked up and dropped almost immediately - like with the scene where one second they're all planning this cunning drone idea to spy on the neighbours, and RIGHT before they're about to do it, 1 of the kids says 'I just wanna climb a tree'. Because kids climb trees. But then the other 2 ignore that kid, and the line is dropped as they go back to behaving like horny adults again. There's absolutely no grace to this idea of childhood getting in the way of adulthood and the scenes jump back and forth like a lamb on the run from a fox - like, just for other examples, when 1 of the kids says 'I just wanna go home' out of ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE before they sell drugs.....and then the line is dropped, and they sell the drugs like nothing happened. Once second you'll see a slapstick scene of an arm being dislocated and reattached my the kids, and then immediately, without a single SECOND to let the scene breath, you're thrust into the kid being upset with his parents getting divorced. Complete with the corny music. You JUST witness a guy being thrown into a back-alley bin with his arm flopping around, and then all of a sudden, he's a confused child upset about his parents splitting up. This is the first time he mentions it to his other 2 friends as well, so it comes across even more jarring than it already did. One second you're laughing at 3 friends having a loud public argument with lots of swearing and ugly crying, and then 2 seconds later, a contemplative and reflective 'walking home' scene where you need to consider how hard growing up is. Again, with the corny melancholy guitar music. If you think this is all done for comedic irony, it isn't. These are 'emotional' scenes. And they're appalling.

The weird thing to me is that the majorly funny parts of Good Boys all involved adults. The main character's dad talking about masturbation. Stephen Merchant being mistaken for a peado. The fed-up cop at the corner shop. The paintballing massacre with the drug dealers. The car accident on the highway. When these kids and their unlikable awfulness are BOUNCING OFF of the adult comedy, it works fine! That's when I got the chuckles! But when the kids are CARRYING the adult comedy, it falls flat on its stupid face. They talk like they’ve had immaculately scripted lines written with adults purely in mind. They respond robotically and exactly like how a confident jock adult would (that one kid in the lunch hall inviting the main kid to the kissing party acts like he’s 30 and it is NOT funny, just distracting). In fact, the kids mostly talk exactly like adults would in a stoner comedy - but that’s the issue - EXACTLY like adults in a stoner comedy. If they were gonna keep running with the idea of 'kids saying the swears lolololol' as the ONLY major joke, then these were parts written for older kids. To hear them coming out of younger kids does not work, especially when it’s not clever - leading me BACK to what I mentioned about the tampons - I mean, there's kids misunderstanding what sex toys are (which is pretty funny), but then not knowing what a tampon is when I know for a FACT kids YOUNGER than that learn about them at school doesn't come across as a funny juxtaposing misunderstanding of a kid being in an adult world.....it just makes them look like idiots.

Mix all of this in with almost amateur YouTuber editing and cheesy external sound effects that only serve to cheapen the humour (such as when a horror noise plays when 1 of the guy's sisters appears from behind them) and overall you have something that tops 'worst comedy' for me this year when I could swear nothing would beat 'What Men Want'. Good Boys feels like a one-off sketch stretched out to fill the void of more mature movies to keep adult-only parties in the cinema while The Lion King, Dora the Explorer, Playmobil Movie and Ugly Dolls Movie take the reigns for 'family blockbusters'. So basically, a longer shit filling out the gaps between the baby shits. Roll on, autumn. This has been a pretty bad summer.