Review: Good Boys (2019)

Good Boys (2019)

Rated R for strong crude sexual content, drug and alcohol material, and language throughout - all involving tweens

Score: 4 out of 5

Good Boys was, well, a very good boy. The most obvious comparison is to a live-action, feature-length South Park episode, but I'd personally go with '90s Nickelodeon on bath salts as my reference point. It fused uproarious, and very R-rated, comedy of both the slapstick and situational variety with a plot that wouldn't feel out of place in a legitimate kids' movie about adolescent boys getting up to wacky hijinks, and instead of feeling like it was just edgy for its own sake, the mixture lent authenticity to its young protagonists, kids who fantasize about all the things that their parents always stridently deny their little angels are capable of. It's a film about growing up, holding onto childhood friendships, and also loads of sex jokes, nut shots, and F-bombs, one that will likely remind viewers of how awesome they wish their childhoods were like.

Max, Thor, and Lucas are three sixth-grade boys in the suburbs who are just starting to learn about girls. Max has a crush on a cute classmate named Brixlee, Thor is a theater kid whose insecurity about such has caused him to adopt a macho attitude and consider quitting choir, Lucas is an extremely sheltered kid who's learned that his parents are getting divorced, they all play a Magic: The Gathering-esque trading card game together, and they all want to go to the kissing party that's being hosted by the "cool kid" Soren. Problem is, they don't know the first thing about kissing or girls, and when their attempts to learn about such from the internet merely lead to bad porno, they decide to steal Max's dad's drone in order to spy on the teenage girl next door Hannah and her boyfriend. This becomes the start of a series of events that sees Hannah and her friend Lily chasing our protagonists across town after they steal from Hannah a bag that turns out to contain ecstasy, leading to a run-in with a cop, a brush with death on the highway, encounters with frat-boy drug dealers and a dreg of nerd culture, fun with a paintball gun, a hare-brained attempt to replace the drone, and the likelihood that they will all be grounded for a very long time if anyone finds out what they did that day.

This movie grabbed me almost from the very first scene, where Max's dad awkwardly tries to cover up the fact that he was getting ready to use a video game's character creation menu as wank fodder, something that I think anybody who grew up after the PlayStation 1 era can relate to without going into gory detail. The poster for this film puts the R rating front and center to let you know what you're in for, and it is not false advertising: you will get adolescent boys learning about sex, alcohol, drugs, and all manner of depravity over the course of their quest to get to Soren's party and stay one step ahead of Hannah and Lily. Everything is treated in precisely the over-dramatic manner that you'd expect from kids like this, for whom this is seemingly the raddest thing in the world only to find out the hard way how real it all is. When I mentioned '90s Nick, I was specifically thinking of Rugrats and The Adventures of Pete & Pete as the shows this most reminded me of, not just in tone but in the sense of it being about little kids having adventures in an adult world that they have little understanding of. Their obliviousness with regards to the sheer wrongness of the situations they find themselves in, with only the slightest grasp of "adult" behavior, is the root of many of this film's biggest laughs. Jacob Tremblay, Keith L. Williams, and Brady Noon were all perfectly cast as three kids who all had clear and distinct personalities, but who are still, deep down, dumbass adolescents who think they're all grown up just because they're in middle school. They nail the sweet spot of not being completely innocent, but still being children; they know the word "fuck", but they think that having three sips of beer makes them hard, they have no clue what the various "CPR dolls" and "beaded necklaces" they encounter actually are, and when they first watch porn, they are horrified by it.

And that was this film's secret weapon. South Park this ain't; that show's bitter cynicism is nowhere in sight here, and nowhere among the "Bean Bag Boys" is there a hateful Cartman-like figure. Instead, this is a coming-of-age story about these boys taking their first steps on the road to adulthood, and it makes clear that their childish antics are a phase and that they ended the film as better people than when they started. As hormonal as they are, it's shown that they were at least taught well, and they avoid the creeper antics that are too often seen in raunchy teen sex comedies; when push comes to shove, they respect the boundaries of the girls they interact with. I've noticed this as a trend with movies that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have been involved in (they produced this), going as far back as Superbad: even when they're throwing all manner of R-rated gross-outs at the viewer, they keep the humor focused squarely on the main characters who are driving the humor rather than using others as the butt of the joke. Their films never get mean-spirited, and while the characters may be flawed, they are never portrayed as unlikable, irredeemable jerks unless they're supposed to be the villains. Women especially, instead of being portrayed as sex objects, often get plenty of time to jump right into the chaos themselves. In short, this film went out of its way to make sure that I not only laughed my ass off, but that those laughs felt good, rather than just serving up misery for me to laugh and cringe at.

It helped that the cast was outstanding. I've already gushed about the three main kids, but I also loved Molly Gordon and Midori Francis as Hannah and Lily, the closest thing the film has to real villains. Instead of simple obstacles for the heroes to overcome, Hannah and Lily proved to be surprisingly interesting comedic foils for them, childhood friends who are implied to have gone on their own wacky adventure off-camera and are very much the slightly older female versions of our protagonists. The supporting cast is also staffed with a who's who of comic actors, including Will Forte as Max's dad, Lil Rel Howery and Retta as Lucas' parents, and one of my favorite roles, Stephen Merchant as a British nerd who is very easy to mistake for a pedophile and proves to be only slightly less weird. From front to back, the film is loaded with comic set pieces and light action scenes that set up the punchline from far away, but do so in service of the buildup to what you know is coming. Again, good comedy is hard to really review without giving away the joke, so this is one of those "take my word for it" situations: the hits far outnumber the misses in this movie.

The Bottom Line

If you're looking for a raunchy comedy that delivers big laughs without going out of its way to be simply offensive for its own sake, Good Boys is a damn good one. It may be fairly slight, but from start to finish, it works.