Kids today say the darndest fuckin’ things. Such as, “This park is fuckin’ lit.” Such as, “My uncle flew a drone for the Army, and now he has nightmares and he’s got crazy diarrhea.” Such as [to an eccentric bearded gentleman], “What the fuck are you lookin’ at, Gandalf?” Such as, “I know what cocaine is.” (That’s the cute and unsettling little sister.) Such as, “You don’t have pubes, and I have six.” Such as [to a lady in a porn video playing on a laptop], “Get out of there, girl!” Such as [with regard to the sex doll they mistake for a CPR doll], “Why does she have hair in her mouth?”
That last quote comes right after Max (played by Jacob Tremblay, a.k.a. the kid from Room, and also The Predator) practices kissing on the sex doll. Yes, Good Boys is a mild-gross-out and swearing-kids comedy, the R-rated tale of three sixth graders reveling in their youth (“We’re not kids, we’re tweens!”) but hurtling toward adulthood, which is to say their first “kissing party,” which is to say they spend the better part of 90 minutes walking around with a childproof-cap vitamin bottle full of molly that they struggle, to great and theoretically hilarious lengths, to open. Also, at one point the kid from Room (and The Predator) romantically gives the girl he’s got a crush on a necklace that is actually anal beads.
The tweens pronounce it ann-al beads, by the way, and pronounce cum as coom, and speak knowingly about social piranhas and sensual harassment, and define nymphomaniac as “someone who has sex on land and sea.” Kids today. Though it’s directed by first-timer Gene Stupnitsky (who cowrote the script with Lee Eisenberg, his screenwriting partner on Year One, Bad Teacher, and several episodes of NBC’s The Office), the Good Boys marketing blitz has wisely focused instead on its producers, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, attempting to place this reasonably sweet but exceedingly slight August-doldrums shrug in the hallowed lineage of Superbad (no) and Sausage Party (fine). I am torn between hoping this movie does OK box office–wise (any win for a non-superhero flick helps), and worrying that it’s going to do way better than the way-better Long Shot (starring actual Seth Rogen) and Booksmart (which has almost the exact same plot, just with high school seniors, though their antics are soundtracked by Run the Jewels, also).
Good Boys is a very, very, very chill hang, the plot (get to the kissing party, and also replace a busted drone) spare to the point of nonexistent, the jokes crass but never quite offensive. (On tampons: “Girls shove it up their buttholes to keep babies from coming out.”) It has the distinct, lazy “80 percent of an actual movie” vibe you get from most Netflix originals; they oughta hand out laptops to everyone in the theater so you can second-screen a little. Max’s buddies in “the Beanbag Boys” are a spiky-haired, volatile musical-theater kid named Thor (Brady Noon) and a tender worrywart with divorcing parents named Lucas (Keith L. Williams). They are growing up at different rates (hence the six pubes) and growing apart; the Season 3 iteration of the Stranger Kids gang, which is split between die-hard role-playing-game enthusiasts and newfound kissing enthusiasts, is a good reference point, even setting aside the fact a mean older kid yells, “Hey Stranger Things, go fuck yourselves!” as the Beanbag Boys bicycle by.
High jinks ensue. Beer bottles are shoved down pants, drones are destroyed, six-lane highways are crossed by screaming sixth graders (to the strains of Run the Jewels). Paintball-gun fight in a frat house. S&M gear mistaken for ninja gear; sex swing mistaken for actual swing. (The vast majority of this stuff is in the trailer, minus an anal-bead gag or two.) It all feels very much like Rogen and Goldberg keeping the brand going—not sullying it, exactly, but arguably diluting it and very inarguably not improving upon it. I like the way Max talks about other kids’ parents, from “His dad doesn’t even pay taxes” to “Everyone knows your mom plagiarized a cookbook.” But Good Boys has an overwhelming Getting On With It feeling: Here’s your swearing kids, your mild gross-outs, your mild pathos (the worst thing you can call a tween, apparently, is random), your party at the end. You’ve seen this movie 20 times already. Worse versions, maybe. Better versions, definitely.
There are nods to the reality of being a sixth-grader in 2019: the drone, the social media shaming, the Googling of porn, the fact that a former Saturday Night Live cast member is inevitably going to play someone’s dad. (Will Forte.) But Good Boys can’t quite navigate the fact that it’s a movie about 11- or 12-year-olds that was shepherded to the screen by a bunch of 40-somethings, which might explain why climactic moments are soundtracked by ’80s cheeseball jams like Asia’s “Heat of the Moment” (which you may recall from The 40-Year-Old Virgin) and Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” (which you may recall from Bad Moms). I am not advocating for 11-year-olds to make wide-release movies, and the Foreigner inclusion at least attempts to make sense: Thor can’t decide whether or not to audition for the ’80s jukebox musical Rock of Ages, now updated by an overzealous drama teacher to include more cocaine. But it’s never gonna not be weird to watch Seth Rogen’s generation project their ribald childhoods onto actual kids from the kid from Room’s generation.
Anyway, notably, at least one actual 11-year-old is super into this movie already, so what do I, a non-11-year-old, know. (The R-rated aspect is pretty much entirely verbal, which makes reading about all this pretty much as harmful to children as watching it, so my apologies to all you teenagers.) It is enough that nobody in Good Boys is wearing a superhero mask (though one kid does wear an S&M mask). I hope this movie does better box office than it deserves, but not so much better that it trounces all the 2019 comedies much funnier than it.
