Viewed – 09 August 2014  DVD

You know when you generally don’t watch something ‘everyone’ seems to recommend because you have a nagging feeling it’s not going to be your cup of tea?  Yeah this was one of those movies.  Yet with the sequel just hitting cinemas, and the offer to watch the first for nothing … well, why not I hear you ask?  This big-screen outing for the popular slacker teen comedy TV series about a group of misfit friends, outcasts in their social lives and not exactly babe-magnets … has the the principle characters heading to Greece for a holiday of a lifetime.  Will they discover themselves, will they become men, will they get laid … do we care?

Admittedly these guys are likable, played well by the four piece of Simon Bird – the cautious intellectual, James Buckley the all talk no action one, Blake Harrison the simpleton and Joe Thomas, the one who can’t get over his ex.  It’s basically 90 minutes of nob gags, very crude language (how many times is ‘gash’ uttered? …erk), and a sort of wood for the trees love story that is waaay too obvious.  The gags here are mostly delivered in totally unbelievable ways with the sort of stupidity you’d barely accept in a five minute cartoon.  Doesn’t help that much of the supposedly funny one liners are either just another avalanche of swearing or simply ‘meh’.  So there lies it’s biggest problem – it thinks it’s funnier than it actually is (but for a puking incident towards the end …had me laughing).  Oh and how one guy gets the girl when he clearly doesn’t deserve her is borderline insulting.

Fans of the TV series may still enjoy this out of sheer familiarity with the characters.  I barely saw the series, so maybe I’m missing something.  But with a clichéd setting and clichéd situations (oh, one of the reps is an arrogant womanising scum bag … go figure).  This just lacked anything that could have made it stand out.  And didn’t Kevin & Perry Go Large do this already?

Verdict:  2 /5