Misogynistic, depressingly crude . . . yet it’s box office gold
Yes, parts made him laugh. But BRIAN VINER says summer’s hit teen movie The Inbetweeners 2 makes his heart sink. And his daughter agrees
FOUR young Englishmen go backpacking around Australia. That is the inoffensive, seven-word synopsis of The Inbetweeners 2 movie. But this blurb hides such a barrage of obscenity, of words and images ranging from the plain crude to the downright misogynistic, that it makes my heart sink to report that the film’s first-week box-office returns already proclaim it the comedy hit of the summer.
To help those who missed the first Inbetweeners film three years ago — the culmination of a hugely popular series on Channel 4 — the basic concept was as follows: four young men, in those awkward years in between adolescence and adulthood (hence the name) and struggling with burgeoning virginity, A- l evels and interfering parents, lift the lid on the truly revolting recesses of the teenage boy’s mind — and bedroom.
It proved a winning formula: takings on the opening day exceeded the entire production budget. It ended up making over £45 million and spent three months in the nation’s cinemas, being withdrawn eventually only at the distributor’s request, because the DVD was about to come out.
So the success of this second spin-off of the Channel 4 sitcom was more or less guaranteed. But just to be sure, the writers have made it even ruder and cruder than the first. And believe me, that is quite a feat.
As the Mail’s film critic, I was obliged to see this film. As the parent of a 15-year-old boy, even more so. There were no advance Press screenings, so last week I joined the hordes of excited teenagers ( and more than a few children yet to reach their teens, including some who can’t have been more than ten) at our local multiplex.
The Inbetweeners 2 carries a 15 certificate, meaning it is deemed unsuitable for those under 15, but the people checking tickets might as well have been handing out lollipops on the door for all the care they took to weed out those too young.
It is dispiritingly evident that, on occasion, the film classification board is simply wasting its time.
In fact, it mystifies me that this was given a 15 certificate at all — it would have been rated 18 a few years ago. The humour may be puerile, but the obscene language and imagery are far too much for young teens.
Even for those who are old enough to see it legally, I can’t help shuddering at its likely influence on them. I took my son Jake and his friend, though I use the word ‘take’ loosely. He insisted we part company in the car park, in case his schoolmates spotted us. Among that age group, the only thing sadder than not going to see The Inbetweeners 2 this summer is going to see it with a parent.
Once inside the cinema, we sat well apart, but in any case none of his friends could possibly have seen me.
For, with every instance of words such as ‘ gash’ and ‘ clunge’ (used to describe women or their genitalia), with every homophobic jibe, every misogynistic suggestion that all girls are either easy conquests or appalling harpies, and with every fresh burst of appreciative audience laughter, I sank lower and lower in my seat.
The misogyny is the most worrying aspect of all. From girls of their own age to their friends’ mothers, these four men have no respect whatsoever for the opposite gender, seeing every female merely as ripe for sex.
Alarmingly, audiences appear to love them for it. And that they have little or no success in those sexual ambitions is neither here nor there.
I tried not to think about what my son and his friend, sitting somewhere i n the dark — boys with female friends, mothers and sisters — were making of it.
The film begins with a message home from Australia from the least appealing of a very unappealing bunch, Jay (James Buckley), boasting that he is DJ-ing in a Sydney nightclub and waking up every morning with a different woman in his bed.
He claims to have ‘pulled’ Kylie Minogue, Elle Macpherson, even Dame Edna Everage. For Jay, anything in a skirt will do, even if it’s a man. It’s all a fantasy, of course, but his friends are fired with envy and set off to join him.
At this point I must confess that, as I said in my recent review for the Mail’s film pages, I did occasionally hoot with laughter myself, above all at
They see every female as simply ripe for sex
a very witty skewering of gap-year cliches, but also at a moment of comedy so lavatorial that it did in fact turn a water slide into a lavatory.
There is an honourable tradition in this country both of lavatorial humour and plain vulgarity, stretching from Donald McGill’s postcards to the Carry On films and beyond. The Inbetweeners fly that flag relentlessly, and at times very amusingly.
But they — or more accurately, writer- directors Iain Morris and Damon Beesley — go way, way too far. This is the latest consequence of a troubling downwards spiral, in which each gross-out film — with its eye on a dif f erent kind of gross, t hose box- office millions — tries to outdo the last.
This syndrome began, as most movie syndromes do, in America. As far back as the Seventies, pictures such as Pink Flamingos in 1972 plumbed uncharted depths of tastelessness. And with the likes of American Pie, in 1999, the tasteless teen movie seems to have become a dubious art form in its own right.
I normally applaud the spectacle of British film-makers outdoing their American counterparts, but not t his time, so blatantly does The Inbetweeners 2 attempt to set new levels of depravity — and achieve them. The stars have actually boasted as much; having ‘got away’ with pushing the boat out with the first film, they say, this time they have gone properly overboard.
The principal tool for all this is sex. And here it’s important to remember the film’s target age group.
Of the four leading actors, two are now closer to 40 than to 18, but not so the majority of those flocking to see them play gauche, sex- mad chauvinists.
They are still impressionable children, and if everyone around them thinks it hilarious to see a man having sexual contact with a woman only because she’s too drunk to tell him to stop, as happens in this film, then so do they.
Those who defend such images say that The Inbetweeners 2 is manifestly ‘over the top’, and also that the idea is for us to laugh at rather than with the four hapless protagonists, whose revolting language, boorish behaviour and antediluvian attitudes are plainly intended as ‘ironic’.
Well, many years ago the actor Warren Mitchell t ol d me t he same thing about the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, in which he played the irredeemably racist and sexist Alf Garnett. He said that the joke
The stars boast they’ve hit a new level of depravity
was on, rather than with, Alf, and that the programme was clearly lampooning bigotry and prejudice, not promoting it.
I took his point, but some years later the actress Meera Syal explained to me that the casual racism in the playground of the primary school she went to in Wolverhampton was always notably worse on mornings after Till Death Us Do Part had aired.
Thus it is with The Inbetweeners. I don’t expect my own teenage son to regard this ludicrous quartet as heroes to be emulated, but some teenage boys unquestionably will.
It can be dangerous to over-estimate that fabled British sense of irony.
Moreover, I worry as much about impressionable young women seeing this film as I do about young men.
For the message is as loud as it is lewd: all boys, beneath whatever veneer of civility they might present, are basically Neanderthals who consider girls (and indeed women of any age) good for one thing only.
In fact, I am amazed that there has not been more reaction from feminists to this movie.
Yes, it is fiction, but my particular concern as a parent of teenagers is that — deep down — it will be interpreted by both genders as a kind of documentary.
This, girls, is what blokes are really like, what they’re really thinking about when they talk to you nicely about your A-level results.
And this, boys, is the amount of drink, drugs and questionable sex you can have if you go backpacking round Australia. Oh, and don’t worry if your
car runs out of petrol i n the Outback and you start to die of thirst; you can always let your mate urinate into your mouth. That happens, too. This film’s spectacu- larly bad taste comes in more ways than one.
Similarly troubling is the way The Inbetweeners 2 presents all these overseas adventures — which also, incidentally, include killing dolphins by feeding them junk food (my multiplex audience exploded at that) — as one great rite of passage.
The institution of the gap year between school and university, or after university, is certainly ripe for mickey-taking (and the film is at its funniest when it does so without recourse to crudeness, relying only on wit). But fundamentally, the gap year is a rather lovely idea: it’s about personal enrichment, literally about a young person expanding his or her horizons.
There i s no sense of t hat in t his film. No accurate depiction of how a year spent abroad can be the making of a young man or woman.
Does the film accurately depict anything? Well, i t depicts how comedy has degenerated in recent years.
I repeat, some of the laughter at the multiplex was mine. But I came out of the cinema feeling very depressed and genuinely unsettled.
The Inbetweeners 2 will continue to pack the cinemas, and for every
This film shows how comedy has degenerated
online message of support I might get for this article, there will be many more raining abuse, calling me pompous, a prude, and much, much worse.
I can live with that, and I also know that as a middle-aged man this film is really not intended for the likes of me.
But I also have a 21-year- old daughter, Elly, who i s nobody’s idea of a prude, yet after seeing it two nights ago she too declared her concern.
So I think I have every right to be a worried father, don’t you?