REVIEW: The Inbetweeners Movie

Dir.: Ben Palmer

With: Simon Bird, James Buckley, Blake Harrison, Joe Thomas

I have never actually watched The Inbetweeners TV show and was very surprised to suddenly find myself buying a ticket for the film. I obviously cannot tell you whether it is better or worse than the show, so if you’re a fan you’ll have to judge for yourself. I vaguely knew that the show was about four teenage friends from the English suburbia and their desperate attempts to get some action and survive the sixth-form politics at school. The first ten minutes into the film I kept thinking ‘I cannot believe I’m actually watching this’, the language was pretty much like this – ‘it’ll be like shooting clunge in a barrel’, you get the picture.

And you know what, once I got more or less familiar with the protagonists and what they represented, I really really enjoyed the film! It was one of the most cringe-worthy things I have ever seen, simply because the embarrassing moments in it weren’t at all outlandish and I could actually imagine real-life teenagers get into similar situations. The holiday plot is similar to “The Hangover”, but it is much more realistic and way more painful to digest.

Oh, the pains one has to go through in one’s youth in an attempt to impress the opposite sex and fit in with the cool crowd! Oh, the humiliation of looking back at one’s old holiday photos, thinking ‘what on earth am I wearing?!’ I found “The Inbetweeners” quite endearing because it was so easy to relate to. I don’t think I was ever as bad as the four protagonists though – their “slick” dance moves, drunken adventures and general naïveté are something else entirely. 

The dynamics in their group seem unforced and it is pretty obvious that the young men get along very well in real life as well. Their comedy skills were pretty impressive for their age and I am quite curious to see the TV show now. The film is not the perfect comedy and some of the crude language was not at all necessary, although there were some literary gems like ‘the moment I realised that ‘God’ is just ‘dog’ spelled backwards, I stopped caring’. Amen to that.