THE INBETWEENERS REVIEW

Firstly, I’ve got to lay my cards on the table here. Full disclosure. I first discovered the Inbetweeners TV show about a quarter of the way through its first season. And I absolutely adored it. I don’t think it had a bad episode in it’s 3 seasons. It never failed to make me laugh. For those of you that don’t know the TV show followed the lives of 4 unlikely friends during their school years. You had the geeky / annoying guy, Will. Simon was the awkward, plain Jane (maybe jim might be more appropriate) guy. Jay was the bullshit artist and Neil was the simple one. And to be fair, most of us could relate to all the characters. The 4 lads found themselves on the hunt for “clunge” (use your imagination) on a weekly basis, as most young men do. And the episodes played out with vulgarity and hilarity every minute.
So after 3 seasons, the lads left school and that was the end of the series, until it was decided that a movie could capitalise on the success of the TV show!

I went into this quite excited as I really love the TV show. The lads set off on an end of school / heal a broken heart for Simon / fuckfest of a summer holiday in Greece. Couple this with a number of, granted some quite funny, situations and 4 girls who are almost like the female equivalent of the lads and you have 96 minutes of a 20 odd minute TV show.

It starts off well enough, plenty of laugh out loud moments. As a matter of fact, the first 20 or so minutes are really well done and funny. The entire cinema were splitting their sides laughing. And then it runs out of steam. From there it briefly gets going again, and then just hits a brick wall and collapses, in one big mess. The middle lags and drags and at times the whole things feels incredibly rushed and slapped together. Watch for a scene before the lads get on the boat and Simon is having a heart to heart. It’s an obvious reshoot as the lighting is completely different and you’d want to blind not to see it. Really sloppy. The whole flung together thing is really prevalent in the final quarter of the flick where things just seem really disjointed. Even the soundtrack seemed all over the place. I’d suspect this may be a very different movie from the original one that was shot!

If your a fan of the show, this one is hard to forgive. While it doesn’t rape you the way SATC 1 & 2 did, it’s incredibly underwhelming for a TV show that is overwhelmingly brilliant. Sadly, this is really only for the fans, and even if you’re a hardcore fan you’ll really struggle to enjoy it from start to finish. TV sitcoms don’t really make for 90 odd minutes of cinema. Take the Simpsons. How many years / seasons did they go through until they finally hit the big screen? And even then, it was a let down. The Inbetweeners cannot translate into a big screen movie. It can’t. It’s bloody impossible. There is no way in hell you can stretch a short comedy TV show into an hour and  a half without something giving. And it’s a huge discredit to the talent behind the show!

Overall the Inbetweeners was an outstanding TV show. Sadly though, your better off getting out the boxsets and watching them for a night, instead of leaving this tarnish your memory of Si, Neil, Jay and Will.