Review of Neighbors (2014) by Mrmoviebuff — 08 May 2016

'Bad Neighbors' is an inconsistent comedy, which is painful for me to say since I have been a huge fan of Seth Rogen's style of comedies. I also find the R-Rated comedy to be undervalued by many other critics or film-goers, but here, something was lacking, and it was my laughter.

The movie stars Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne as a couple trying to raise a child in a once quiet neighborhood. They are a very happy couple who live their life peacefully without any disruption from anyone so they can focus on work and parenting. That is, until they find out that they have new neighbors moving in.

The new neighbor is Teddy (Zac Efron) who is a young student that obviously loves to party. There is the intentional stereotype that Rogen and Byrne represent the ever-so-busy parents, and Efron represents the young, loud and sometimes not-so-clever frat boy.

Situations start to escalate as the parties continue to disrupt the lives of the couple every night, and they try everything they can to get Teddy to "keep it down". When the couple get the police involved, that's when Teddy has had enough of it, and retaliates by causing further disruption and that's also when the couple decide to take action into their own hands.

There are many scenes of loud parties including people getting drunk, young people making out, dance-offs and so on. What shocked me the most was how little of it I found funny, Seth Rogen's previous comedy 'This is the End' (2013) had me crying with laughter and I think this is mainly because the jokes stayed within context. Here, we hear many references to pop-culture subjects, but these jokes place the movie's plot to halt.

'Bad Neighbors' tries everything it can to earn its R-Rating, it is indeed vulgar, crude and everything in between...but most of these features don't apply properly to what the film is supposed to be about.

There were some funny moments in this film, but unfortunately, they were underwhelming. This is not a bad comedy...just a comedy that needed to know what kind of jokes it needs to make to stay within context of the plot.