Bad Neighbours **½ (2014, Zac Efron, Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Dave Franco) – Movie Review

Ah, bad neighbours, we’ve all been there! Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play a married couple in their 30s with a new-born kid, who move into a new dream home that turns into a nightmare when a fraternity of 24-hour-party people move in next door. When being nice doesn’t work, the couple prompt a full-out war.

The fraternity’s run by Zac Efron and Dave Franco, two very nice-seeming young actors, who are required to go down and be dirty. Though they throw all they’ve got into it by way of cheesy charm and huge acting skills, they’re never convincing as bad boys, and, worse still, they’re never really funny. It’s all such evident play acting, it doesn’t work. Anyway, who other than the late John Belushi could make Efron’s role of psychotic frat party boy both credible and hilarious? It’s sure not Zac.

Efron’s mega-talented, but this role isn’t a good showcase for his talents. He needs subtler, posher, smarter, cleaner material. He just isn’t the funny kind of guy that can make this kind of thing fly. He can be amusing, but Zac hasn’t got the natural ability to be funny, so he’s going to need to learn how to act it.

He’s got a great body, but does he have to keep showing it off and does Rogen have to keep commenting on it, and showing us his chubby body? Franco is a funny man, and does raise some giggles, but by and large his silly role mostly defeats him.

Rogen and Byrne come off best, with likeable, truthful comedy performances, though their efforts to raise laughs increasingly get as desperate along with their characters. Christopher Mintz-Plasse, a man with a real funny bone, is somehow lost and stranded as Scoonie.

Let’s be frank. Some of this bad-taste comedy is very dirty, borderline filthy. Its script is casually sexist and homophobic. Though a lot of stuff in the screenplay by debut screenwriters Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien is extremely funny, it lacks real wit, finesse and cleverness, and always goes for the lowest common denominator. That said, it raised some huge laughs at the press show. The Robert De Niro impression routine sequence is priceless.

Check out Animal House to see how this should be done.

It was a hit and the inevitable sequel followed: Bad Neighbours 2 (2016)

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/