Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising - Uninteresting characters and weak humor
Seth Rogen has produced and written some movies I’ve really enjoyed, so it is a shame that recently his projects have been so lackluster. I never saw the first Neighbors but I heard genuinely positive things, so perhaps things just didn’t go well in the process of making Neighbors 2. The humor in Neighbors 2 is weak and uninventive, from what I can tell most of the jokes are recycled from the previous movie. The film doesn’t feel like a blatant cash grab or a failed attempt to begin a franchise, but it certainly isn’t good.
Kelly (Rose Byrne) and Mac Radner (Seth Rogen) are trying to sell their house. The same house that once neighbored the fraternity Delta Psi Beta. Their house is put on escrow, meaning they have a 30 day period when the new buyers can cancel their purchase because of anything they might not approve of. A group of freshman girls living on campus attempt to join a sorority but when they learn that sororities are unable to throw parties and have to attend sexist fraternity parties that treat their women attendees as objects. Shelby (Chloe Grace Moretz), one of the girls turned off by the fraternity parties gets a group of girls to raise enough money to buy the house next to the Radner’s. When the girls begin to throw lavish parties the Radner’s worry that the new buyers will not want their house. When Teddy (Zac Efron), the president of the former fraternity, decides to help the girls fight Mac and Kelly so they can keep the house and so he can get revenge. The war of pranks between the neighbors begins for a second time.
What really drags down the film is the lackluster characters. While Byrne, Rogen, and Efron give great performances and their characters are enjoyable to watch, nobody else in the film is interesting. Especially the sorority sisters that form one side of the film. Moretz once again gives a profoundly average performance in a character that feels completely one-dimensional. Kiersey Clemmons, who plays Beth, is an upcoming talent who has showed her tremendous acting and comedic ability in past film and TV like Dope and Transparent. In this movie she falls flat, not because of her acting, but because of a lack of character development in general. She, like many other female characters, are stereotyped in roles that seem to be in every comedy film these days. Nora, played by Beanie Feldstein, is a vague skin of every character Rebel Wilson has ever played. When you deal with characters this weakly formed you don’t really feel engaged in the story at all. You find yourself begging to get back to the other subplots.
On top of that, the jokes didn’t really grab me. Humor is often considered objective, but many people in the theater other than myself didn’t seem to laugh at most of the jokes as well. The humor is just pretty uninventive, the ground it treads is too familiar. We have seen it all before, there are no risks, no interesting ideas from the mind of these writers or the director. It’s all familiar jokes, and never do these jokes actually make an interesting statement about the current state of college culture. Which would be fine if the film wasn’t trying to be smart in its evaluation of college sorority and fraternity culture, but it does. It feels like the film is trying to make smart, feminist comments, but it doesn’t work. Everything they try to say has already been said, and so it just feels lazy in its attempts. There also is a really tone deaf joke about police brutality halfway through the film that feels completely unnecessary to the film, and isn’t even funny. It almost comes off in an insulting tone.
Neighbors 2 isn’t a terrible film that insults its main audience or tries to aspire to heights and then falls on its face. It’s just an unmemorable film that isn’t funny. There are some good moments between Rogen, Byrne, and Efron, but everything else tries too hard. I can’t move myself to dislike the film because the film is so mediocre and average that it is hard to feel anything other than apathy.