Review: Good Boys

For a franchise that dominated the box office for years, you sure don't hear much about the Hangover movies these days. What, no reboot? But of course, Hollywood has been rebooting that series for years: change the leads, preferably in a way that makes their one crazy night (or day) seem even more outlandish (20-something white guys going on a bender being pretty much the most predictable storyline ever), and away you go.

Here's the good news: Good Boys is actually good. It turns out the big twist you need to breath new life into this genre isn't so much respect for everyone - which made the otherwise entertaining Booksmart feel just a little cloying and preachy at times - as it is a solid comedy contrast. Here it's a trio of basically sweet pre-teen boys trying to navigate a NSFW world; the jokes don't exactly write themselves, but it's a good start.

Max (Jacob Tremblay) is a nice kid who's just discovered girls; Thor (Brady Noon) is worried he's getting too old for musical theatre; and Lucas (Keith L. Williams) is probably just a little too keen on following rules. Together they're the "beanbag boys", a gang nobody cares about who are probably - if they were paying attention - just about to grow apart.

But not just yet. When Max accidentally trashes his dad's treasured drone ("it's not a toy - it's for work"), the trio band together to raise the cash for a replacement. Fortunately for comedy but unfortunately for them, their schemes rapidly spiral out of control; selling a sex doll is one of their more sedate antics, especially once they get tangled up with a pair of older girls (Molly Gordon and Midori Francis) who just want their drugs back so they can go to a concert.

The stakes are kept small - their big road trip is a few miles to a nearby mall, and crossing a highway is the big action scene - and the crudity promised by the trailers is relatively sedate (and made a lot funnier once the trio's essentially nice natures are established). The main performances make this work; they're all plausible as slightly clueless kids and charasmatic in their own right, which goes a long way towards making this charmingly funny rather than annoyingly blunt.

By having the kids at the age where they basically still want to do the right thing, this manages to tap into an essential sweetness that makes the lowbrow jokes (hey look, they're mispronouncing "anal") funnier than you might expect. It'd be nice to think this is the natural end point for this kind of comedy (unless someone figures out a way to stage one with babies), and if it is, it's definitely going out on a high.

Not that kind of high though; one of the best running gags in the film is the way these kids earnestly say no to drugs even when drugs aren't an option. Which for this kind of film has to be some kind of a first.

- Anthony Morris