A worthless sequel in a Summer chockful of them…except that that’s not exactly true since people looking for big studio comedies actually do have original choices like “Popstar” or “The Nice Guys” or the indie dark comedy “The Lobster” or “Love and Friendship.” “Neighbors 2” is quite simply the worst comedy choice in theaters right now, and doesn’t really deserve any “business as usual” points.
What Works: I wasn’t a big fan of the first “Neighbors” movie, but I did have to give it points for showing Rose Byrne could have a personality in a movie. In this installment, she’s mostly pushed to the background, but Zac Efron takes her place as an actor showing layers you didn’t know existed. His fallen aging frat God having an existential crisis is vulnerable and hilarious, and you’d almost rather watch a movie about what someone like this does post-college than a sequel that essentially takes the exact same plot with a would-be “fresh” gender twist.
What Doesn’t: The script is beyond lazy, and most of the jokes don’t work because of this, like the sight gag of a baby playing with a dildo which is used five times too many. I’m in the minority of reviewers in that I thought the first “Neighbors” movie was one of the worst Seth Rogen films, but that film still allowed for genuinely reflective character moments on aging or parenthood that are largely missing here. But the biggest difference is that the first movie had confidence in its frat vs. family premise, and knew how to get you to root for the family while still fleshing out the frat as humans.
The sequel is confused and unconfident in its depiction of the sorority girls, and can’t seem to figure out exactly how venal Chloe Grace Moretz’s head sorority girl is (she’s portrayed as an empowering role model for young women one minute, then setting up drug busts to corner the weed market the next, then a virgin but also a confident weed head, then a vengeful prankster who’s still daddy’s little girl). I can almost hear one of the film’s characters lecturing me—since this is the kind of movie that wants to “think piece proof” its jokes by dissecting the politics of them onscreen—about “if it was a man, you’d find it a multi-dimensional character” but it’s actually just an inconsistent character. The script is afraid to push her into full-blown anti-heroine mode but the cop-out ending feels cheap and faux-feel good. [They’ve spent the entire movie at odds with this person, so why would they care about her friendships?] Rogen seems to get a little tripped up in his script’s own message. Towards the climax, most of the main characters are more worried about their antagonist’s friendship than they are the financial ruin of an escrow deal not going through. It’s as if they’re begging people to not find anything offensive…”Pay to watch this movie…find it empowering…but also funny! Do you know sororities can’t host parties? Sucks right?[Flop sweat] Please don’t write think pieces about us!”
What I Would Have Done Differently: “Neighbors 2” has a good movie inside it (what does a frat king do when college is over and everyone finds him pitiful?), and even a potentially good other movie inside it (the starting of a sorority that can party). But neither of those really has room for Rogen and Byrne, and it feels like they’re sewing three separate movies together to accomodate this Frankenstein’s monster, and that’s probably why all of the movie’s best scenes involve Moretz or Efron, but not Rogen.