Spence and Smith's script leans into character work, as alluded to above. The focus is on Billy and Neil, but Dave and Sue figure prominently. It reminded me of Guy Ritchie's early films with their large casts of bizarre yet believable folks hovering around a plot that revels in matter-of-fact absurdity. There's a certain looseness to the narrative that belies a solid structure. What I mean is the film never loses momentum over its nearly two-hour runtime even as it takes little detours to deliver character beats. Much of the comedy is derived from the hapless nature of the leads, but the movie is never mean-spirited. On the contrary, the tone is deliberately uplifting in spite of the friends' various troubles. It's unabashedly wish-fulfillment cinema that fits right in with the recent kindcore movement. I also want to note that it seems to be a period piece in that we're operating in a timeframe where flip phones and print media are still prominent. In some ways, that makes the film feel almost ahistorical, though.
