The Inbetweeners 2 - movie review: 'The boys have never been lewder or cruder'

This hilarious sequel takes telly’s favourite quartet of oversexed teen underdogs out of the suburbs and into the great wide open
Lewd and crude: Simon, Will, Jay and Neil once again get into social mishaps abroad
Guy Lodge16 August 2014

Sitcom spin-offs are always a risky proposition for film-makers. There’s a vast difference between what audiences are happy to watch for 25 minutes and what they’re willing to sit through for four times that length, particularly when they’re paying for the privilege. Time and again, then, they resort to the old “let’s go abroad” trick: by placing familiar characters in unfamiliar surroundings, usually ones with a little more widescreen appeal, the risk of self-repetition is reduced.

Unless, of course, you do it twice. In a curious way, it takes balls — ones bigger than the saggy pair glimpsed in one of this sequel’s many gleefully grotesque gags — to vary the set-up as little as The Inbetweeners 2 does, once more taking telly’s favourite quartet of oversexed teen underdogs out of the suburbs and into the great wide open.

In 2011, their riotous first cinema outing took them as far as Malia, Crete, where the beachy surroundings had little brightening effect on their typically wince-worthy succession of social mishaps. Now, university-aged Will (Simon Bird), Simon (Joe Thomas) and Neil (Blake Harrison) are off to Australia, where twerpy would-be lothario Jay (James Buckley) is already holed up working as a toilet attendant and bragging about shagging both Minogue sisters simultaneously. Rudge Park Comprehensive is far behind them, but nobody’s growing up any time soon.

That stasis lends an odd poignancy to The Inbetweeners 2 amid its hearty, mostly hilarious splatter of below-the-belt gags. Where the TV show was about children finding their social position, the new film is instead about four adults who haven’t yet found it — a very different crisis indeed, and one they’re only beginning to learn can’t be solved by masturbatory fantasies and idle “bantz”.

Lest that suggests this lairy comic institution is going soft on us, rest assured that the boys have never been lewder or cruder: creators Iain Morris and Damon Beesley even pull off a tricky comic coup involving both oral and anal expulsions in a swimming pool. The Farrelly Brothers will be green with envy; the rest of us simply green around the gills.

Needless to say, these antics aren’t for everyone. Female viewers, meanwhile, may feel shortchanged by a film that features few women who aren’t high-maintenance stalkers or muddled hedonists.

Perhaps those limitations, however, are simply indicative of the boys’ own arrested development: nobody leaves The Inbetweeners 2 a hero, and we love them for it.

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