The Inbetweeners Movie

Whenever a successful British TV show is transplanted to the big screen, the resulting answer on how to update proceedings without repeating what has gone before seems to be always the same; 'let's go on holidays!' A recent example of this was Kevin and Perry Go Large, a film painfully stretched from it's sketch format across 90 uneventful minutes. Well unfortunately the makers of The Inbetweeners Movie have learned nothing from past disasters such as this. Snatched from it's small screen origins the film repeatedly mistakes bad language for genuine comedy and never reaches the highs of the original series. While the original E4 comedy show was never classic in my book, it still featured embarrassingly crude situations, a novel core relationship between it's four friends and amusing potty mouth. It had relatable teens doing relatable things and that was what was part of it's charm. Unfortunately, this does not translate to the big screen. Here the film finds Will, Simon, Jay and Neil finished with school and deciding to go to Malia for their holidays - as any young, girl obsessed teenage boy would. While there was plenty of comedy that could have been mined from their unfortunate trip, the film never manages to find it's gear and outside of one funny empty dancehall scene, is noticeably short on decent gags. It speaks wonders in fact that that one humourous scene is classic slapstick, while the rest of the jokes the film has to offer is based almost entirely on crude variants on words for female genitalia. At least the show balanced this out with relatable issues that any teen goes through, such as girls, social status and school. Here our morons act, for the first time like annoying morons - completely out of touch with reality, never learning a thing and end up as winners. As a result, any camaraderie you might have felt for the lads is gone. At least before they seemed to want to do the right thing and it was always their own bad circumstance and attitudes that tripped them up. Here they are just stupid and shallow and hard to empathise with. Overall the film gets by on the likeability of the actors who do just barely enough with their characters to make things bearable. However at the end, you can't help but feel that the film is the equivalent of when a young child screams out 'POO!' in public. He might think it's hilarious, but everyone else just wants him to shut up.

Verdict: 3/10
Sexist, far fetched, immature and crucially, not very funny. Timing for jokes is off, everyone seems to think they are crafting comedy gold and the guys likability factor dwindles. A shadow of what has gone before.

"The Inbetweeners Movie" Trailer