Courtesy ORION Pictures Inc.
Movies
Ayo Edebiri is having one hell of a run. Not only does she play the second lead on the wildly popular foodservice drama series The Bear, she picked up some voice work as April O’Neil in Mutant Mayhem, the first good Ninja Turtles outing in who knows how long, and now stars alongside the very funny Rachel Sennott in Bottoms, a sort of teardown of horny teen comedy cinema tropes told in borderline Airplane! type parody.
Bottoms find’s Edebiri’s Josie and longtime best pal PJ (Sennott, who also co-wrote the script) hitting senior year and desperate to fuck. Think of it like Olivia Wilde’s enjoyable 2019 comedy Booksmart, only sillier and much dirtier. Platonic friends PJ and Josie are queer, and both have leaned heavily into a rumor they served time in juvie over the summer as a means of gaining clout. To get closer to their crushes Brittany and Isabel (Kaia Gerber and Havana Rose Liu), our heroines devise a faux self-defense class that operates under the guise of empowerment while actually operating like a fight club. They bring their teacher Mr. G (a surprisingly hysterical Marshawn Lynch) along for the ride as a faculty advisor.
And so begins the lie, which actually does start to make its participants—a ragtag group of weirdo women who join for various reasons—feel empowered. Meanwhile, the players on the school football team led by the irascible and arrogant Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine, who absolutely nails his role as a dangerously entitled prick) feel threatened by the show of feminine solidarity and together set out to destroy the club. Caught up in football fever and a rivalry with a nearby school, the faculty and student body are of no help. Will Josie and PJ bone their crushes? Will the football team get between them? Why does Jeff suck so hard?!
For those who missed the criminally underrated Shiva Baby, being the last time Sennott teamed with Bottoms director Emma Seligman (the film’s other writer), this new one is a must. It identifies so many terrifying high school norms and lambasts them that it almost feels like a public service. From toxic masculinity and sports culture to entitlement, violence and sex, Sennott and Seligman’s script attempts to address the absurdity of what we consider normal, and Edebiri’s deceptively high-strung performance steals the show at every turn. Sennott’s funny, too, but wisely gets out of Edebiri’s way. The larger cast of freaks and geeks feels so right.
Bottoms does sadly stop short of truly deconstructing the issues it brings to the surface, though it’s likely that’s a statement in and of itself. We accept so much when we’re young, and the so-called adults often let it ride. Bottoms might as well be a riff on the antiquated idea that boys will be boys, too, and serves up a reminder that everyone has issues. Still, it’s quite funny and very strange and not at all the sort of film we often see in mainstream theaters. If nothing else, if you ever wanted to see a football player get kicked right in his stupid face, your ship has come in.
7
+Very weird and funny; Edebiri rules
-Doesn’t effectively examine its premise
Bottoms
Directed by Seligman
With Edebiri and Sennott
Violet Crown, R, 91 min.
