Film review: The Inbetweeners Movie

The transfer from television to cinema has been a graveyard for many succesful shows and this latest British effort fails to buck the trend

• The cast from the original television show are all present in The Inbetweeners Movie but the laughs seem to have been misplaced along the way

The Inbetweeners Movie (15) **

Directed by: Ben Palmer

Starring: Simon Bird, James Buckley, Blake Harrison, Joe Thomas

THERE'S nothing like the space provided by the big screen to let the energy of something perfectly suited to television dissipate. Following the tried, tested and relentlessly flawed lead of countless British sitcom-to-cinema transfers, E4's furiously funny The Inbetweeners Movie sends its cast off on a foreign holiday and stands helplessly by as the rapid-fire gag rate of a tightly edited and performed 25-minute show gets lost amid the chasm-like cracks of a story too flimsy and predictable to sustain it for 90 minutes.

Featuring the same actors, and made by the same creative team responsible for the show (writers Iain Morris and Damon Beesley, and director Ben Palmer), it's a toss-up as to who is to blame for it being this disappointing.

Certainly the principal cast of "no longer boys, not quite men" protagonists reprise their roles with the same gleeful lack of shame that made them so endearing in the first place. But as many a small screen comedy actor has discovered, that try-hard, mugging-for-the-camera acting style that sometimes works on TV can be ruthlessly and cruelly exposed when transposed to the cinema. Comedy actors need a little bit of range to be able to make their characters live and breathe on the big screen and on this evidence, none of the Inbetweeners have those skills.

The priggish, intellectual Will (Simon Bird), whose narration frames the film in much the same way that it did the show, remains the funniest character by virtue of the fact that at least a couple of his self-deprecating gags and weary observations about the moronic and damaging effect of school do actually raise a smile. But relentless braggart and sexual fantasist Jay (James Buckley) has lost some of the innocent charm that his purile and borderline offensive observations on the opposite sex used to possess; the perpetually love-struck Simon (Joe Thomas) is now little more than a whiny irritant, while happy-go-lucky dimwit Neil (Blake Harrison) is further sidelined as a sort of idiot savant who is one step away from being the new Kevin and Perry.

But it's not just down to the cast. The script isn't up to scratch either. Yes, the dialogue is still as inventively profane as it ever was in the show, with the boys still exhibiting an Inuit-like ability to find endless new nomenclature for the one part of the female anatomy they spend most of their waking hours thinking about. But a script is about more than good dialogue, and the standard of jokes and the quality of the set pieces leaves a lot to be desired. The structure is too blandly predictable as well, with the characters practically checking their watches to see if it's about time they grew up. The new characters are also depressingly one dimensional, a particular disappointment given that they're mostly young women who turn out to be not only remarkably forgiving and patient with our heroes, but also unquestioningly into them, perhaps proving that the writers are just as clueless as their protagonists are about how women think and behave.

Maybe it was just all a bit too much for director Ben Palmer who, visually speaking, seems to have exerted himself with an early crane shot through the English suburbs that gives the film a short-lived burst of cinematic flamboyance.

It's too bad because there's long been a shortage of ribald British teen comedies that are able to balance gross-out yucks and a forthright attitude to sex with genuine sweetness at their core. America has them by the truckload, of course, and whether they're indie flicks (like some of Kevin Smith's early work or Rushmore), or the more mainstream likes of Superbad and American Pie, at their best these films manage to put the teen experience onscreen in a way that's funny and relatable. The Inbetweeners, having successfully overcome the debilitating influence of Grange Hill, was in a prime position to do that and, perhaps if all involved had taken a few more notes from Armando Iannuci's In the Loop (one of the few TV-to-cinema spin-offs that actually worked), this might have been the film to break the mould. Instead, it's just another needless spin-off destined to wring what will likely be a considerable sum of cash out of TV show that had already reached its natural end point.