Buenos vecinos

While I didn't quite find this movie as hideous as many others clearly do, the combination of obvious gags, badly developed characters and lazy acting makes for a fairly forgettable experience.

The premise looks funny. The trailer is mildly amusing. The final product is lame. Unfortunately, the funniest parts are all in the trailer, so after about 30 minutes it just felt like I was sitting around waiting for the next scene I had already seen in the preview.

Some of the scenes seemed like first takes. I felt like I was watching DVD extras. I highly doubt they had a completed script. It felt like they were winging it half the time, which basically means Seth Rogen playing Seth Rogen, which was old ten years ago.

Skip this and go find yourself a midnight screening of Revenge of the Nerds.

Neighbors plays as a typical Seth Rogen meets Zac Efron comedy. Its demographic double play aside, Neighbors is very good at blending its two kinds of comedy, frathouse and new-parent angst together into a tight and consistently funny package. The film draws connections between the two house, new parents Mac and Kelly Radner (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) secretly crave their old wild lives, while the boys at Delta Psi look at their brotherhood as a sort of stable home environment.

Neighbors at first seems to string along many unconnected pieces then eventually we see he first connection come along and start to process as the film goes along. It is a silly comedy and many of the negative reviews seem to have complaints about this. It isn't trying to be a masterpiece or anything special but what t does, it works and there are a specific audience for these kinds of comedy.

I'm struggling to understand how this got such good reviews. I usually rate the IMDb score as the gold standard but something has gone seriously wrong here. I did see the trailer, it was good and contained the only laughs of the movie. The movie was truly the most tedious thing I have ever experienced. Why did it get such good reviews from critics and such a high score on IMDb? User reviews here are spot on. Not a single good review. The reviewer above who mentioned he had sat down to more entertaining bowel movements surpassed any joke in the film.

Something is very wrong here.

As I write this review, there are around 200 reviews posted. As far as I can tell, fewer than 10 of them rate this film at 7 stars or above, yet its average rating is slightly more than 7 stars. In fact, while the vast majority of reviews on the first five pages give it only 1 star, the ratings summary says that only 1.2% of those rating it gave it just 1 star.

This is a long way of saying that it's now inescapable fact that trolls, spoofers, and studio shills dominate the site. A system is only useful until enough people figure out how to game it, and this is (sadly) now the case for this site.

On to the review: Neighbors had a big challenge to overcome with me, as I just don't normally find Seth R. and his "Seth Pack" to be very funny. Unfortunately, this film fails on every level to provide either humor or entertainment. It's a rare film that can depict all characters as totally unsympathetic and get away with it. After all, the viewer needs to be able to identify with SOMEONE in a story or film, even if it's the third-party narrator. This movie has absolutely no sympathetic characters in it at all. It's the essence of comedic nihilism. I didn't like any of the characters, none of them said anything that was vaguely funny, and I didn't identify with any point of view expressed in the film. To make matters worse, the director relied solely on profanity and T&A for shock value.

Totally worthless movie. Don't waste your time.