THE INBETWEENERS MOVIE Review - Knee Deep in Clunge In Crete
Provides middle-of-the-road closure to the popular series but big fans will probably still enjoy it enough.
rating: 2.5
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Even when a television show as celebrated and long-standing as The Simpsons struggled to justify its existence beyond the bite-sized confines of a slot on a TV channel (fun an outing though it was), what chance did The Inbetweeners Movie ever really have? The Inbetweeners became a runaway hit in its brief, 18-episode run, but on the big screen, the challenge to measure up is much more fierce, for a distended version of 'ol faithful doesn't really cut it. Following gleefully in the tradition of game-upping by taking advantage of the opportunity to be more graphic than its TV counterpart, this is otherwise little more than a 90-minute episode which just about makes a passing attempt at providing fans with closure. We reconvene with the lads - Will (Simon Bird), Jay (James Buckley), Neil (Blake Harrison) and Simon (Joe Thomas) - on their last day of college. As Simon is surprise-dumped by the girl he has been chasing for the entire run of the series, Carly, the collective newfound freedom of the group prompts them to up sticks to Greece for a debauched lads' holiday. While for the other three it's all about booze and sex ad literal nauseum, for Simon it's about winning Carly back once he realises she is also in town. Once they chance upon a group of like-minded British girls nearby, though, things change considerably, and they come to wonder if they might all have had their fortunes turn around. While advantage has been taken of the 15-rating and the generally more permitting moral guidelines of cinematic certification, the writers of The Inbetweeners Movie haven't really in turn exploited the chance to further develop these characters, who became archetypes after three seasons but have become by the end of this film outright cliches. The full-frontal male nudity and graphically crude humour grants a few shock laughs, but they only account for part of what this beefed-out treatment should have allowed. Generally speaking, the humour is sporadic and gags are telegraphed too far in advance, resulting in a tiresome pantomime-like quality for most of the elaborate (and more often than not, visual) jokes. The voiceover narration also by this point feels passe and needless; do these characters and these situations not stand alone on their own merits by now?