The Inbetweeners 2 sees all the main cast from the popular British TV series such as Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley and Blake Harrison return to entertain us one last time for this second film in the series. This film comes from Directors Iain Morris and Damon Beesley and tells the story of when Neil, Simon and Will travel to Australia to visit Jay who is having the time of his life down under during his gap year.
The Inbetweeners 2 Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTkYDsnAomk
The primary plot of The Inbetweeners 2 is very straight forward and easy to understand. I don’t want to spoil it by going into way to much detail with it, but basically they all come to Australia to join Jay during his gap year. They all travel around the country with their backpacks and visit clubs, briefly see the opera house, visit a water theme park and see the outback. It’s a travelling/adventure movie and I like the way that it is set up, it helps to keep the plot/pacing of the movie moving forward by having them visit place after place.
The entire Australian adventure is filled with jokes and many awkward and cringe worthy scenes that had the entire theater I was in filled with constant laughter. I myself couldn’t stop laughing when all of them traveled to the water park and that’s what The Inbetweeners 2 does the best, it’s incredibly funny!
I would say that out of all the characters in the movie that this film is more focused on Jay’s (James Buckley’s) character and there is some amount of effort put into developing who he is as a person in this film. I think that he sort of can’t decide between his life with his friends and pursuing girls or to go for the one that he actually likes. We see a somewhat slightly different version of Jay to what people would know from watching the TV show (although pretty much the same Jay most of the time). Characters like Will (Simon Bird) are the same as always, Will spends the majority of his time trying to get with Katie (Emily Berrington) who he meets when he first comes to Australia and makes a fool of himself the entire time doing so. Blake (Neil Sutherland) is as stupid as ever and has some of the funnier moments in the movie but his characters sort of just tags along. Simon (Joe Thomas) has some drama with his girlfriend Lucy(Tamla Kari) who we see chat to her during his trip over Skype.
The plot and characterisation is good enough for a comedy film and looking back at the TV series and some of the first film I would say that this one holds up quite well. It’s certainly very funny and I was very entertained throughout the entire showing. At only 96 minutes in run time it’s not a particularly long film, but the time does pass quite quickly for this Inbetweener’s adventure. The director’s both did an okay job and the jokes and timing are all great. There is only really one slow scene where they go to the desert/outback which sort of slows the movie down but overall the pacing is good.
As for the Australian setting, I enjoyed it. There are a lot of jokes and destinations that I’ve been to in the film and I appreciated a lot of them. I don’t know what everyone will think about every single thing that was said and done in the film but for me, it was just funny. What I like about The Inbetweeners TV show and this film is that it kind of balances at times between awkward situations for the characters and funny moments which is always good to watch. I heard some people making some noises where I thought maybe they had some issue with the dolphin scene in this movie and possibly they disagreed with the treatment of the animal, but I couldn’t care less. The Inbetweeners 2 was overall just funny and it’s a comedy so nothing in it is serious or real. It just depends what people like I guess. But for me, it was good.
Overall this film is similar to what you could expect if you’ve watched the TV show before. It’s a solid comedy film and I like the adventure concept of travelling all around Australia. Some of the jokes are very funny and I certainly couldn’t stop laughing in certain parts of this movie. I think that fans of the show will certainly enjoy this and those who can appreciate the humour are the ones who are most likely to have a good time.
