2023's Bottoms was a massive hit with critics and audiences as people lauded the return of raunchy high school comedies that now starred rarely featured gay main characters. Unfortunately, this unfunny and overly predictable teen flick was more of a mess than it claimed its main characters to be.
The premise of this film is that the lesbian main characters start a fight club in order to hook up with girls. Now, looking at this poster above, I thought all the students, including the two football players, would be gay and active participants in this fight club. Yes, gay football players, because why not? Cameron Tucker was the best of them. I also thought the fight club would be more like this club where people showed up to comically take out their anger in a more wrestling adjacent format.
Instead, the football players were your typical stereotypes and the fight club was really violent and mostly serious. They tried to act like the violence and the seriousness was funny or absurdist, but honestly, it was really boring. In order to get members, the character PJ painted the club as this place where women could come together and bond under the guise of female solidarity, and the members of that club do find that connection with each other save for PJ.
But this connection felt like forced commentary. They have a meeting where they go around a circle sharing their problems, and Brittany expresses she's tired of her smarts and her business being overlooked. But her character is never actually developed beyond being PJ's crush and Isabel's friend, and even earlier in the movie, Brittany says something about her personality being attached to Isabel's, so clearly the writers wanted to have their cake and eat it, too.
None of the other characters are developed, either. PJ just wants to hook up with Brittany, Josie just wants Isabel to like her, Isabel just goes back and forth between Jeff and Josie, Jeff himself is just a caricature, and his friend whose name I can't remember for the life of me is just a cliche high school villain. Hazel is the only person who has a personality and is even remotely interesting to watch, but even she's tossed aside towards the end as a sudden new love interest for PJ, which unfortunately I saw coming as soon as those two fought in the gym. And frankly, Hazel deserves better than one of film's most unlikeable protagonists.
The movie tries to make some commentary on how PJ is basically using feminism for her own agenda but doesn't actually go anywhere with this. Any time in this movie they try to do commentary, it just feels like they're throwing in some random line or gag to pat themselves on the back for their callouts. This popped up again in the circle of sharing when they had the weak "gray area stuff counts" and "8th time's the charm" lines to joke about the way women are used to sexual harassment from men.
They also did this when they had the random guy complain about PJ and Hazel kissing because he'd rather watch the homoeroticism of football, rather than actually showing us the homoeroticism of football and developing that throughout the film. It's not like they didn't have the potential with Jeff and his buddy.
Then there's the moment where they simply had cheerleaders pour water on one of the girls so that her white top would become see-through as a commentary on the nature of cheerleading. I guess the writers thought they were super clever for this, as well as for the gag when the main characters called out the bell ringing minutes after they got to class to poke fun at the trope.
I don't think this movie had to be some deep dissection of these themes or a heavy criticism of society, but the bad writing makes it all feel disingenuous. They sprinkled in all these empty moments so that rather than crafting a genuinely clever and subversive high school comedy, they could disguise the fact that what they were really making was yet another movie about losers in high school who do crazy unhinged crap that has no point or purpose.
Honestly, I'm so sick of seeing so many movies and shows about teens where the main characters are losers. I swear it feels like 50% of Hollywood is just a bunch of bitter writers who got bullied in the 80s and can never let it go. Ironically, this movie is written by people born in 1995 so they should be in my age demographic, and yet it still feels like overcompensation from high school experiences.
The number of times the characters call themselves ugly losers is so annoying, like we get it. You're ugly, untalented losers. Oh my god. It's like they wanted to keep reminding us we were watching lesbian Superbad, but it forgot to actually be compelling like Superbad. Also, this whole thing about high school main characters chasing after love interests has gotten way old. It was bad enough to have girls constantly chasing after boys and revolving their entire lives around them, but just because your main female characters are now chasing after girls, it doesn't make it any more interesting.
The plot was also randomly convoluted for no reason. The movie had the two main girls pretend to have gone to juvie to validate the fight club's existence and get members all so that the football players could expose them and have this super blow up emotional moment at the pep rally which was so obviously coming. Why??
Then the final act, my god. Suddenly there's a top secret 50-year-long murder plot and the fight club has to band together to save their high school football team by violently beating up the rival team before they can kill Jeff? Literally who thought of this complete nonsense? I had to fast forward through most of the final climax because it was unbearable to watch. This is not absurdist comedy. This is not good storytelling. This is just a massive waste of time in a movie that can't commit to anything.
They wanted to tell this coming-of-age story starring lesbians, but then they also wanted to make fun of teen romances and movies about high school. Plus they also wanted to be a raunchy rated R comedy, and at the same time they also wanted to be absurdly violent. Oh, and let's not forget the typical woman-scorned revenge section in the middle, not to mention reminding the audience every five minutes that we're watching a woman-empowerment movie that isn't actually empowering women but wants to pretend like it's one while also trying to poke fun at the idea.
STOP TRYING SO HARD.
Defenders of this movie will say "Oh, it's just satire, they're parodying other movies that came before." To those people I say, this movie is not a parody or a satire. Regardless of whether that was the intention, there was absolutely none of that in its execution. It was pretty much just a play-by-play of every cliche on the planet. The public exposure, then the two friends getting in a fight, then a sad montage with Avril Lavigne singing over it — and by the way, they were brilliant to use "Complicated" because it kept me from fast forwarding through the scene as I sang along to the iconic song.
Including these boring, badly written, cliched moments that follow the typical teen movie playbook does not inherently make this movie a parody or a satire, but it does make it extremely lazy. If you want an example of an actual parody, then watch The Starving Games, which is a direct parody of The Hunger Games, and it's actually funny, too. As for satire, you could probably flip on a random episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and get your fill. Phineas & Ferb, a show made with the intention to be appropriate enough for kids to understand and enjoy, has more satire than this film did.
Even without the parody or satire, you'd think okay, maybe this movie's just straight up comedy. BUT IT'S NOT FUNNY. I can count on one hand the number of times I laughed. Literally. One of those times was Josie randomly dropping Hephzibah as her fictional child's name in an otherwise overly unfunny rant, and another time was Mr. G's pop quiz asking who started feminism.
The random kid in the cafeteria who started making plans to blow up the school after getting fruit tossed at him earned a chuckle, and I can't even remember what the other two moments were because they were drowned out by the film's intentional "if we say a bunch of random stuff really fast people will assume it's funny even though it's not" type dialogue.
From the minute this movie started playing on my TV, the dialogue was really quite bad in every possible way. Overly expository, unnatural, cringey, awkward, there was really no end to the problems with the dialogue all the way through the movie.
If I had to rewrite this film, I would make all the main characters gays who participate in a secret underground wrestling club where they basically get to pin or be pinned by the gender of their liking, thus actually getting something out of the title Bottoms. Jeff and his football buddy would end up together, PJ wouldn't be insufferable, Brittany would reject PJ not because she's straight but because she's simply not interested, Josie and Isabel would each have a personality, and Hazel wouldn't get treated like a plot device.
I mean, the first rule of fight club should be to never talk about fight club, so this movie had a massive missed opportunity by making the club some public and sanctioned thing that everyone knew about just because the writers thought somehow that would make it funny. There's a lot of room for situational comedy, farce, and straight up allegory with a closeted fight club for all the school's gays, no matter where they align with 21st century perceptions, expectations, and stereotypes.
If there's one thing we can take away from the movie that we did get, it's that people in Hollywood need to try to focus on telling stories naturally through simple themes rather than trying to be this, do that, mimic this, parody that. Until then, we'll continue to get more films like Bottoms that strive to be everything and ultimately give us nothing.