Starring: Simon Bird, James Buckley, Joe Thomas
Now living as university students, Will (Bird), Neil (Blake Harrison) and Simon (Thomas) receive word from their friend, Jay (Buckley) that he's spending some time with an uncle in Australia and has become a top DJ with beautiful women at his beck and call. Skeptical, the others go off to Australia and find that Jay lives in a tent and on a mission to win back his ex-girlfriend (Lydia Rose Bewley) and they tag along.
The old saying goes that you can't argue with success. Well, you can but to a certain extent it will always be a futile exercise. I must confess that I've never been a fan of The Inbetweeners, the student sit-com that spawned this movie, and its 2011 predecessor and maybe it's the low-brow humour that it uses, maybe I just have an odd aversion to this type of sit-com (sacrilegious as it sounds, I've never quite "got" The Young Ones, whilst I bow to its obvious popularity and legacy) but, as with The Young Ones, I admit that objectively the show is not bad. In particular I've always seen Simon Bird and particularly James Buckley as talented actors but the first Inbetweeners film didn't win me over for the reasons stated above. Part two has failed to make me a convert, but it was an improvement on past experience.
That isn't to say that Inbetweeners 2 wholly revamps the formula in the previous film, much is the same. There's no major character progression and the humour is of a similar style, even if the quality of the gags is significantly higher whilst the whole "lads abroad" idea from the first film has been transferred from Greece to Australia. The object of ire has shifted a little. The first film made much of its humour from low-budget and rather shoddy holiday resorts, here the object seems to be backpacking and the humour is more verbal in nature than physical.
After six years of the same characters, there's a level of confidence that the main cast have with their performances that helps sell the humour and whilst the film does cover sex and toilet humour (often seen as "easy" laughs), there's a level of originality to them that means that a smile or a mild laugh may just occur even to non-fans (read: me). It would've perhaps have been nice to build on the some of the smaller supporting cast, particularly those from the show itself and fill in a little more of the gap of what's happened between the last movie and this one but fans of the film will probably like this a great deal. Those not so taken with the show?...They might not find it so bad.
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