To be honest, Bottoms snuck up on me. I didn’t see any trailers for it or anything. I might have seen a poster at the AMC but had no idea what it was about, like, at all. The title didn’t help. Regardless, I saw a few bits here and there, had one friend call it “meh,” and saw a YouTube critic or two say the opposite. I actually figured I was more inclined to agree with the YouTube critics. Besides, it sounded like whatever I thought the movie was about, it may not really be that.
I mean, the plot was supposedly about two high school lesbians starting a fight club so they could have sex with some cheerleaders at their school. That seemed kinda weird to begin with. I do tend to like weird.
PJ (co-writer Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are high school classmates, friends since childhood, and lesbians. Both of them have a crush on a different member of the school’s cheer squad, and they are at the very bottom of the social ladder. PJ is a bit abrasive and in-your-face while Josie is a bit more timid and inclined to be quiet. However, after the school fair, the girls are getting ready to drive home when they spot Josie’s crush Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) arguing with her boyfriend Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), the quarterback of the high school football team. The girls offer Isabel a ride, but Jeff blocks their path, causing Josie to barely nudge him in the knee with her car. He falls over and cries out like he’s been shot, and the end result is the two girls are summoned to the principal’s office, where the only thing that saves them from serious trouble ahead of homecoming is Josie’s on-the-spot statement that they’re starting a self-defense club for girls.
PJ, however, really runs with it, using a rumor the two girls were in juvie over the summer to attract some female classmates to their self-defense club, one PJ is referring to as a fight club. PJ has a plan: use the fight club to get her and Josie’s respective crushes to sign on and seduce them. But despite a complete lack of knowledge on, you know, fighting, the very act of starting the club has an empowering effect on the girls in the club and their faculty advisor, Mr. G (a scene-steeling Marshawn Lynch). But the football team as a whole is used to running the school, and it may only be a matter of time before they push back. Plus, the fact the girls lied about their time in juvie is bound to come out eventually.
So, the best way to view Bottoms is not to think of it as a standard high school sex comedy. It’s more of a satirical look at high school sex comedies. It reminds me a bit of 2019’s The Art of Self-Defense or 2018’s Sorry to Bother You in that the world the movie is set in is not a realistic sort of world. Instead, it’s more of a blatant allegory. The football team at PJ and Josie’s school are held up as some sort of masculine ideal with the generally hapless and kinda stupid Jeff as their leader/king. He’d run the school if he put even a little effort into anything. Meanwhile, the football players spend almost all of their screentime in their uniforms and pads, and women all over the place seem interested in throwing themselves at Jeff. Meanwhile, the self-defense group/fight club members are actually finding a bit of self-empowerment. It’s not exactly a radical feminist idea or anything. It’s probably about on par with Barbie while being maybe a tiny bit more subtle (but not by much).
And, for the most part, it works. It’s not brilliant, and the best gags are often things happening in the background. I will say I was greatly amused whenever Lynch opened his mouth, and the closing credits led me to believe he might have been ad libbing much of his dialogue. It’s a movie where people care way too much about a high school rivalry, but in such a ridiculous world that I was actually surprised when the final act’s big shocker about that rivalry came out because even with everything that had happened up until that point, that had me wondering if what the school was saying about that game was somehow something just to rile the school up for the game in advance. It was actually a pleasant surprise for me, leading to a pretty effective action/comedy setpiece to end the movie. Bottoms is far from perfect. It does hit a couple of the cliches it is otherwise mocking, but I had a good time with this one.
Grade: B
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