The Inbetweeners Movie

For the uninitiated, The Inbetweeners is a British sit-com centred on four teenage schoolfriends – inbetween boyhood and manhood, hence the title – who, over the course of three series, have gone through all manner of embarrassment and awkward situation in pursuit of girls, drinks, parties and general social acceptance. It’s profoundly rude, defiantly unsubtle and invariably those who watched it laughed both with them and at them. It was basically a British take on the gang from American Pie, with far less wholesomeness.

The transition to the big screen for The Inbetweeners didn’t really bode well. British sit-coms don’t generally fair well in terms of quality when it comes to performing on a larger stage (although, in terms of box office, they usually turn a profit) and given the plot of The Inbetweeners Movie was basically to get the characters we know and transport them abroad on holiday the dreaded shadow of the profoundly dire Kevin and Perry Go Large loomed over this movie like the grim reaper.

Such fears have proven unfounded. The Inbetweeners Movie manages to remain both faithful in tone and crude content to its television forebear and sustain itself for a movie running time. It doesn’t quite possess anything cinematically impressive but, in fairness, that’s a good thing. In fact, almost symbolically, the film begins with a swooping tracking shot from above the clouds, down to a middle-class housing estate and in through a window – it glides along a bedroom to reveal Jay (James Buckley) hunched on his bed over a porn website on his laptop, ready to masturbate using cooked ham whilst wearing a snorkel.



In its opening minute it has laid down the marker. The Inbetweeners Movie has no intention of being impressive or making a bold cinematic statement. It’s designed to deliver jokes and set pieces to make you laugh hard and often.

So we’ve already met Jay, the overtly-crude, mysognist (purely an elaborate façade to cover his insecurities) who forms a quarter of the foursome that is Will (Simon Bird), the posh, intelligent neurotic; Neil (Joe Thomas), the dim-witted, happy-go-lucky lug and Simon (Joe Thomas) the hopeless romantic (emphasis on the hopeless). It is due to Simon being dumped by the love of his life Carli, coinciding with the end of their schooldays together, do the gang decide to head off to Malia, in Greece, for a hedonistic orgy of the clichéd sun, sea and sex. And booze. And sex. Financed by Jay’s dead grandfather’s inheritance (“It’s what he would have wanted”) the film’s barely ten minutes in before its touchdown on foreign soil to let the carnage commence.



In terms of plot it’s easy to cover the extent of ‘arc’ on offer here. The guys hook up with four other holidaying girls and, unlikely as mutual attraction may at first seem, the seeds of affection and romance emerge for all of them. Telling you this doesn’t spoil anything – you can see it occurring a mile off. You have to just let the film off the hook for how implausible it all is (Will’s romance especially, given the girl is gorgeous and both physically and mentally leagues ahead in maturity, never ever feels likely) and go with it.

Beyond unlikely romantic entanglements the film spares just one scene that captures a faint melancholia when Jay realises his friends are to splinter off to university and the group won’t be together much longer; this holiday is their last time together, possibly forever, and only in one brief scene is there a pause to let this register.

After that, it’s promptly ignored. Quite rightly. Maybe a more mawkish American movie might have drowned the latter half of itself with this nostalgic longing but The Inbetweeners Movie is too busy being a streamlined, coarse comedy vehicle to let sentiment weigh it down. It does all it can to ensure the audience is never five minutes away from a chuckle or a belly laugh, and for every joke that misfires or bit of comedy business that doesn’t quite go over, there’s another one-liner, or ‘clamp-hand-over-mouth-aghast’ shock of disgracefulness to ensure the energy doesn’t slump.



For sheer energy, for sheer laughs per running time ratio, The Inbetweeners Movie is a triumph. Probably the last time I sat in a cinema and laughed, properly laughed out loud as much, was for Bruno. The humour is disgusting, from fingering old slappers on the dancefloor to improbably large turds in the bidet, and yet it doesn’t get overcooked and, somehow, manages to remain good-hearted.

Ostensibly it’s because our four leads are likable – as hapless and luckless as they may be there’s nothing mean-spirited here. When Jay tries to ingratiate himself with the ‘cool’ guys and is mocked at and then threatened we smirk at how he scuttles away pretending not to be upset but mostly feel protectively vengeful towards his aggressor. We, as an audience, are with them and rooting for them even as we laugh at them; it’s that quality that made the series a success and it’s continued here with aplomb.

Writers Damon Beesley and Iain Morris have nailed the fumbling, exquisitely painful balance between being so young the world is at your feet whilst at the same time a place you’re ill-equipped to effectively handle. They’ve nailed the agony and the ecstasy of being a teenager and thrown it into the maelstrom of decadence that is the typically British 18-30s holiday.

I can’t help but wonder how this will play in other countries. My hunch is, without brand awareness, The Inbetweeners Movie is unlikely to transcend cultural barriers the way American Pie delivered its rites of passage slice to a wider audience. I’d rather hope it did mind, blasting audiences around the world with all of its clunge-related hilarity.

There’s something sweet and simple about The Inbetweeners Movie, despite all the bad language, embarrassing moments (does the girl in the wheelchair need a sun lounger ponders Will, aloud, to the girls father!) and shock vulgarity. It aims to offer nothing more than good fun and a good time. When comedies invariably come laced with a feelgood message, and movies with bloated running times try too hard to be more than the sum of their parts, it’s refreshing to just sit and be entertained, made to laugh and then bundled out 90 minutes later to talk about the funny bits with your friends.



No crazy twists or complicated plot, no heavy thematic meaning or inane takehome philosophy. No, there’s just the memory of Will having a cock shooting jizz out of it sunburned on his back and Jay standing by a pool with his knob out and Simon floundering in the sea and Neil leading a nightclub in his crazy dancing – pointless and yet oh so funny.

Like a teenager, The Inbetweeners Movie isn’t the finished article; it’s not always polished, it’s sometimes clumsy and it doesn’t look as good as those that are more sophisticated. And, like your teenage years, there’s something in that stupid finesse which makes it all the more special.