Good Boys

I know a lot about missed opportunities. I’ve had truckloads of them. Like the time I was pretty damn sure I knew the winning lotto numbers and spent my money on Four Loko instead of tickets. One time I told Mrs. Filthy I didn’t need to use a rest area when I really did. My colon was about to rupture like a grenade an fill my pants and her car with shit shrapnel. The next rest area was over 100 miles away. Thing was, “Safety Dance“ by Men Without Hats was on the radio and I hate that song so much I didn’t want to miss any time telling my wife that. Now, I prefer riding my bike everywhere because her upholstery holds the odor the way she holds her anger, letting it slowly leak out and remind you every time you sit down.

I am trying to impart my wisdom to you here, because it’s all I’ve got left besides a large collection of underwear with permanent skidmarks, and I think you’d rather have the wisdom. I understand how easy it is to miss opportunities, to make bad choices that end in you living in a basement apartment behind a WalMart instead of having enough money to buy as many winning lottery tickets as your heart desires, to not wake up every morning trying to remember if you already drank all the Four Loko Sour Apple in the can under the dresser. It happens to the best of us, but only the grassfuckers in Hollywood can charge you twelve bucks when they do it.

I take that back. Twelve bucks is what the Harelip charged to see the half-eaten fetus of her stillborn twin, which she kept in a jar of pickle juice. She missed the opportunity to have a sister by trying to eat her while in utero. One day, there was just pickle juice in the jar and the Harelip said she finally finished the job. So, only grassfuckers and the Harelip charge you money to endure their fuckups. Also, Fiat.

Good Boys is one of Hollywood’s missed opportunities. This is supposed to be a raunchy comedy about three pre-pubescent boys trying to make their way to their very first kissing party. Really, though, it’s a prime example of Hollywood fucking up the chance to tell a story from within a great concept. There is for sure a sincerely funny movie that could be made about twelve-year-old boys and what they want. This isn’t it, though. This is the noisy farts of physically mature but socially retarded men. It’s adult hormones and zero capability to recall what it was actually like to be a kid. The result is mean, the rape of childhood just to tell dirty jokes for losers.

Good Boys has all the qualities of my perfect woman; it’s lazy, fake, cheap and settles for mediocrity. But what makes for a great date with me does not make for a good time at the movies.

Lazy. There is nothing appealing about a movie whose plot is based entirely on dumb-ass actions and coincidences that make no sense to anyone but screenwriters who come up with punchlines before the set-up. Shitty screenwriters treat plots like lame-ass escape rooms that they designed. Whenever they get stuck, they just happen to have the key.

Good Boys is about a trio of tweeners, Max (Jacob Tremblay), Lucas (Keith L. Williams) and Thor (Brady Noon) who are--as in all Apatow-style raunchy comedies--the unpopular kids on a quest to go to the popular kids’ party where Max might get to kiss the girl he secretly crushes on. Is this really the most original dilemma this movie could think of? Maybe, but more likely the movie didn’t give a shit.

Before the party, Max has to learn how to kiss. According to lazy-fucking-turd writers Gene Stupnitksy and Lee Eisenberg, these boys have no idea, and don’t even know how to look that up on the Internet. Instead they see porn, which grosses them out. This cheap gag is supposed to make audiences howl. Ha ha, kids don’t get how sex works. What a clever joke! And it only took a massive suspension of disbelief to get to. Plus, the gag isn’t so fucking funny to a full-grown adult who still doesn’t fully understand it.

It also isn’t so funny when nearly half of this movie’s jokes are based on the same Goddamn premise. The boys are unfamiliar with anal beads and can’t even read the box that says what they are. They think a sex swing is just a swing. They use a huge dildo to bar a door. They use a gag ball to actually gag someone. There’s a lifesize sex doll, a gimp mask and on and on. It goes beyond funny and becomes sort of creepy how badly this movie wants to make sex jokes.

The dumb kissing premise launches the boys on a quest wherein they borrow Max’s dad’s (Will Forte in a perfunctory role – what the fuck was hiring him if he isn’t even asked to get laughs?) drone to spy on a neighbor. This is the same drone he has been specifically forbidden from using, so you can be sure something bad happens. It is captured by the two girls (Midori Francis and Molly Gordon) they are spying on, leading the boys on a quest to either get it back or get a replacement. The movie doesn’t care which and doesn’t put up much fight for either.

The plotting is lazy, never building suspense or tension and treats the plot elements like wet wipes to be used until they dry up. It drags along like a two-legged dog as it places the boys in awkward scenes that are drab and drawn from previous raunchy comedies. Awkward encounter with a cop in a convenience store? Check. Frat house crammed with every God damn frat cliché you can think of: spankings; plebes in diapers; bongs; a basement where someone yells degrading things at initiates? Check. Yelling inappropriate things in a playground? It’s here! The boys are forced by the girls to buy drugs, they have to cross a busy highway. The scenes are so damn improbable and tiresome as to be distracting. Even worse, though, they give a mean gloss to the movie. Writers Stupnitsky and Eisenberg are cheap dicks who sell out their characters for the dumbest and cruelest of gags. As a creative writer your job is to be creative, not a barf machine who can’t think beyond what you’ve seen in straight-to-video National Lampoon movies.

Fake. Every interaction in Good Boys is motivated by plot convenience, not personality. The three boys are given tics: Max is the nice kid, Lucas is the do-gooder and Thor secretly loves to sing but is afraid others will mock him for it. Once the movie gets rolling, though, their actions and dialogue are interchangeable and hardly motivated by their tics. It’s as though lines of dialog were randomly assigned. Nothing in their interaction strengthens who each one is. Although, we are reminded that they are best friends, primarily to set up an ending as heartfelt and sincere as a stand-up comic telling you to drive safely at the end of his set.
The girls in pursuit do asshole things, which would be fine if their characters were written as assholes. Instead, they are blank suburban slates onto which Stupnitsky and Eisenberg pile on improbably cruel behavior. That doesn’t stop the movie from trying to use the same girls for a “touching” scene later.

As it wraps up, Good Boys pukes out a message about how people grow up and friendships change, maybe even get lost. It’s insincere horseshit dictated more by the Apatow-rule of having schmaltz in your raunch than it is by anyone actually believing it. The message is absolutely not something a kid realizes in the moment, but that’s how the movie plays it.

Cheap. A cheap looking movie ain’t nearly as much fun as a cheap date, not when it costs twelve bucks. Good Boys has no style and is shot with a dead eye. There is nothing here you haven’t seen before: convenience stores, malls, upper-middle-class suburban homes. The movie is either too fucking cheap or too unimaginative to have flair, to take us any place new, or to show us common places from a fresh perspective.

Nobody splurged on acting lessons for these boys. Maybe this is as much a fault of the director not knowing what to draw out of them or even understanding what the script is trying to portray besides dildos and vibrators. What we get is kids reacting stiffly and without conviction to the shock of seeing sex things they don’t understand. Maybe the young actors really don’t get it; they have no experience to draw from. But, then, maybe they shouldn’t be in this movie. Or maybe this movie is going places it shouldn’t.

I ain’t a prude, but there is something super creepy about a movie just hammering home gags about boys being confused by adult things. One or two gags, sure. But for 95 minutes? I’m not sure who is more confused by them: the kids or the moviemakers. Good Boys is rated R, so it isn’t meant for kids. It isn’t meant for adults either. I think it is supposed to be nostalgic for a type of person who either cannot remember what it’s like to be young, or who has such a weak understanding humanity that think maybe it was possibly like this for someone else.

Good Boys could have been a great comedy, one about universal truths rather than the same old lazy shit. Maybe these boys desperately wanted a Lego set or a video game console. They were conflicted by how badly they really wanted it, but were conflicted because of what the big kids on the other side of puberty would think of them. It could set them on a quest both for an item but also for accepting what they are at the moment, not what they will be. It could have heart, it could have meaning. It could have fewer anal bead gags. It could be good.

This piece of shit, though, ain’t. Two Fingers.