Neighbors (2014)

Neighbors (2014)

2014 R 96 Minutes

Comedy

A couple with a newborn baby face unexpected difficulties after they are forced to live next to a fraternity house.

Overall Rating

7 / 10
Verdict: Good

User Review

  • Bad Neighbours is your standard American comedy filled with drugs, sex and alcohol. Add a fraternity lead by a hot guy, an Australian hormonal mother and a chubby wannabe-hipster father. What do you get? Bad Neighbours. The old peace seekers versus the young noisy hooligans. Standard formula is standard. That is literally the plot. Yet, this allows creativity and innovation to be injected into the film to bring out the hilarity. Surprisingly, this has several funny moments (even after the nth viewing). Ranging from Robert De Niro impression parties ("are you talkin' to me?"), weird hazing sessions and a dance off to the background music of Flo Rida. Random, but somehow oddly amusing that does conjure up a few laughs. Some of the jokes are high on the profanity level and does tend to feel like a competition to see how much the film can gross you out. Grows tiresome unfortunately. Acting all round was functional. Zac Efron has come along way since High School Musical and luckily has good comedic timing. Sure he looks fantastic...heavenly...I would even say Godly, but he can act. Seth Rogen is Seth Rogen. Rose Byrne pulls in a more natural performance and is a personal favourite of mine. Aside from that, it never pushes itself to more than just a crude comedy. If you like that, then great. I however like wit and subtle humour. That's not to say I didn't enjoy this, in fact in terms of recent comedies this is ranked highly. Also, the air bag scenes had horrendous human CGI that just detracted from everything else. If you couldn't do it without CGI, don't do it at all...especially in a comedy like this that utilises many props to give that sense of authenticity. Slight nitpicks but they do amount to negatives towards the film. It's undeniably watchable and a good comedy, but its contents grows tiresome as the runtime goes on.