argylx

This wafer-thin, single dimension movie focuses on Ava, a woman who wakes up one day at home with no memory, her husband telling her she had an accident resulting in a minor head injury. He says the doctors have advised that she needs to rest at home for a few weeks until her condition clears up, but as the days pass, Ava begins to feel something is not quite right.

Unfortunately, from here on out the plot is extremely predictable - you'll probably figure out where it's going, correctly, inside the first 15 minutes. The acting is terrible and if you told me the script was written by an AI chat system, sincerely, I'd believe you.

A script which screams "I think I'm a lot funnier than I am", Bottoms delivers a mind-boggling hour and a half of conspicuously trying way too hard to fill the gap left in recent years for slapstick, PG-raunchy teen comedy.

The plot, loosely, is that two down-and-out, uncool, gay teenage girls start a fight club for the purpose of hooking up with hot cheerleaders (yes, really). Attempts to satirise football-mad small town high school mentality quickly makes the leap from theatrically grotesque to plain grotesque as this abomination of cinema doesn't so much fall down on itself as float like something which won't flush.

Filled with unlikeable characters and bizarre situations, Bottoms aims for cartoonish absurdity yet unfortunately achieves it only in the sense of having fewer dimensions than a repeating background in a 1960s animation.

I can understand why Dave Chappelle isn't to everyone's tastes, but I've always considered his comedic skill to be in his style, his delivery and his ability to raconteur, to regale with extended anecdotes. The first five minutes of The Dreamer were crass, no doubt offensive to many people and struck me with parallels to Ricky Gervais' latest offering, Armageddon.

But that's where the similarity ended. Whereas I found Armageddon to be intellectually lazy, low-effort and crass for the sake of it, it became clear to me as I continued to make my way through The Dreamer that Chappelle's opening minutes were merely a riff on the controversy of his previous shows.

From this point on, Chappelle dives straight back into his signature style, with some deadpan lines revolving around racial humour, his own recent history and press, other celebrities and his unique form of storytelling which draws you in.

I had some good laughs and even where I wasn't laughing, I was entertained.