A flimsy high-school comedy provides just enough of a vehicle for a generation-defining cast.
Laughter and tears are like sneezes, physiological responses without aesthetic substance. That’s why I don’t think less of a comedy that doesn’t make me laugh. What matters is the style with which it tries. Though “Bottoms” gave me a few laughs through sheer relentlessness of effort, it’s seriously style-challenged, not least because it tries so hard.
To the girls’ surprise, the ploy proves effective. They actually know nothing about self-defense; instead, the group becomes a kind of fight club, and the participants take pride and pleasure in giving and taking beatdowns.
The movie resembles TV sketch comedy, with much of the humor derived from hackneyed situations involving stock characters: the dumb jock, the cooler-than-thou cheerleader, the introvert with untapped talent, the weary principal, the sex-starved housewife. This is the basic raw material of teen movies, but the twists and tweaks to which they’re subjected here reveal more contrivance than insight.
What makes it so is the way that Seligman and Sennott go about resuscitating a venerable and fruitful genre that Hollywood has largely abandoned—the high-school comedy—on their own generational terms. The tropes of that genre are so well worn that, to some extent, the flimsiness of the plot and of the psychology can be put down to this self-consciously genre-forward approach. But comparison to modern classics of the form does “Bottoms” no favors.
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