The Inbetweeners 2

After three television series and a movie, chances are you already have a pretty good idea whether you’re on board with The Inbetweeners’ take on teenage boys. So to break the shocking news up front: this is pretty much more of the same. Which actually is shocking news, because the last film made a bit of an effort to push the four leads – Will McKenzie (Simon Bird), Jay Cartwright (James Buckley), Simon Cooper (Joe Thomas) and Neil Sutherland (Blake Harrison) – at least some of the way towards adulthood.
Here we quickly discover that Will’s university career is fizzling (his snooty, twattish ways are even less popular there than they were at high school); Jay’s dream girl Lucy (Tamla Kari) has become a nightmare; Neil is still astoundingly stupid; and Simon – think of a UK version of American Pie’s Stifler, only even cruder and more delusional – is spending his gap year in Australia, which according to him is some kind of sexual paradise where he’s basically been crowned king. As this is a distinct improvement over the lives they’re living in the UK, they decide to pay him a visit “Down Under”, which somewhat surprisingly is painted in strokes somewhat less broad than many of our local comedies. In fact, most of the “satire” is directed at backpacking, as Will and company – having discovered Simon is full of it and is literally working in a toilet – head to Byron Bay to hang out with Will’s potential love interest, Katie (Emily Berrington).
While much of the comedy here can safely be described as “crude” – it’s a film where a character is chased down a water slide by a turd, and when he hits bottom he decides to turn around (not a good idea) – the four leads are a finely honed comedy team at this stage and the balance between idiots saying and doing stupid things and losers mocking them for doing stupid things means this is able to have its crude cake and eat it … not that you’d want to, what with the endless jokes about various bodily fluids.
Subtle it ain’t, and the lack of decent female characters (which the first film made a real effort towards) is a bit of a backwards step, but overall the series is still going strong. The original TV series is still the high point; that’s definitely the place to start if you’re new to the boys.