SMELLS LIKE TWEEN SPIRIT
Innocence gives way to innuendo in Good Boys. By AMANDA SHEPPARD
Spying, stolen drugs and all manner of wrongdoing – enacted by a group of 11-year- olds. Good Boys is precisely as inappropriate and affronting as it sounds, but its unlikely combination of innocence and foul-mouthed humour is a winning one.
Good Boys follows a trio of naïve sixth- graders – Max ( Jacob Tremblay), Lucas (Keith L Williams) and Thor (Brady Noon). The self- dubbed ‘Beanbag Boys’ are suffering the undignified effects of puberty, much to the delight of their embarrassingly proud parents, and school bullies lying in wait.
But when ladies’ man in the making Max scores them an invite to the cool kids’ ‘ kissing party’, a plan is soon hatched. The boys borrow Max’s father’s drone to spy on their older teenage neighbours in hopes of learning some techniques. Perhaps inevitably, things soon go awry.
The film harks back to more innocent days, when swearing was the ultimate cardinal sin. The boys are blissfully ignorant of the adult world – evidenced in their beer drinking challenge (the record stands at three sips) and their confusion between a CPR doll and… something else entirely.
Tremblay, Williams and Noon fit their parts to a tee, looking physically pained when they end up behaving badly. Williams’ Lucas is so profoundly earnest that you can’t help but warm to him, while Noon exerts a totally relatable desire to fit in, and Tremblay’s Max acts beyond his years with his one-track, but touchingly naïve, pursuit of the opposite sex.
Good Boys is clearly a production in the same vein as frat pack films like Superbad, which was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who also produced this movie. But unlike their older counterparts the leads of Good Boys are, ultimately, pure of heart.
In this oddly endearing story about friendship, innocence and profanity go hand-in-hand.