Bottoms (2023)

Written by CinemaSerf on November 9, 2023

"PJ" (Rachel Sennott) and her best mate "Josie" (Ayo Edebiri) are starting the new year at school confident that they won't get laid! It's not just that they are gay, it's that they are gay, "ugly" and "untalented" - a toxic combination designed to ensure they continue to get their fun from Pornhub. Meantime, cheating school heart-throb "Jeff" (Nicholas Galitzine) is having a row with his girlfriend "Isabel" (Havana Rose Liu) that sees the latter take refuge with the girls in their car and the most minuscule of car accidents reduce this macho lad to a gibbering wreck! This is what inspires our duo to start a club at school that will ostensibly teach young women the basics of self defence whilst allowing them to maybe get some "fun" into the bargain! What now ensues is all rather puerile, I found. Maybe it's supposed to be satire, but that any school would allow the pupils to use the gym to beat each other up - under the supervision of a teacher - is just preposterous. The characterisations are just about as shallow as you can get and the writers need to appreciate that using the full gamut of Anglo-Saxon expletives doesn't actually make a film funny. As it lumbers on it becomes more and more cringe-worthy until a denouement that is just like something left on the cutting room floor from an edition of "Happy Days". I get that I'm not the demographic, but this is still a weakly constructed, over-acted and rather aggressive reinforcement of just about every stereotype there might be in an American school - and none of these people come off very well.