Bottoms Review: A Ridiculously Funny Lesbian Fight Club
- Extremely funny, with some brutal satire
- Great performances all around
- Doesn't work as well when it has to take itself seriously
From "M3GAN" to "May December" and from "Barbie" to "Cocaine Bear," 2023 is shaping up to be possibly the best year for cinematic camp in recent memory. "Bottoms," a new R-rated high school comedy produced by "Cocaine Bear" director Elizabeth Banks, is the latest film this year unafraid to find great fun in bad taste. It's the second film from director Emma Seligman, who was nominated for many first film awards for her anxiety comedy "Shiva Baby." "Bottoms" is a massive shift in style and scope, but further establishes Seligman as a director who should be on the radar of any moviegoers who care about comedy and queer cinema.
Rachel Sennott, the star of "Shiva Baby," co-wrote the script with Seligman and stars as PJ, the meaner and more manipulative half of the film's central duo of "gay losers." Ayo Edebiri, who seems to be in everything this year from "The Bear" to "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," plays Josie, the shyer and nerdier friend. The dynamic between the two is comparable to the lead characters from 2019 "Booksmart," the last high school comedy to really make a splash in theaters, but the world they inhabit is quite different. Where Olivia Wilde's film took place in a well-off liberal suburb, "Bottoms" exists in a fantastical red state dystopia. It's heightened satire pushing real problems into cartoonish absurdity. Think "But I'm a Cheerleader" meets "Fight Club" — and not just because it's literally about lesbians starting a fight club.
Predictable drama meets unpredictable comedy
"Bottoms" is a mix of tried-and-true genre clichés with out-there original comedic ideas. We've seen high school movies before where the football players rule the school and the teachers are totally checked out. But this movie takes those tropes to such ridiculous extremes that every show of immature entitlement from star quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) or of divorce-obsessed distraction from history teacher Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch, absolutely killing it in only his second acting role not playing himself) is a laugh riot. We've also seen plenty of stories about characters lying to gain popularity and struggling to sustain such ruses. The ruse being fake murder credentials for the sake of running a fight club for the sake of hooking up with hot girls is something fresh.
I've certainly never seen a movie before where a character casually declares, "My vagina belongs to the government." Is this the first movie to acknowledge the fall of Roe v. Wade? Jokes about Holocaust denial, sexual assault, and terrorism are all fair game here. Anyone who thinks edgy comedy has been killed by "wokeness" certainly hasn't seen "Bottoms." Like "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," the hard-R material here is able to shock while still staying on the right side of the issues being joked about; it might offend some viewers, but it's not punching down or being truly mean itself even when the characters are.
And those characters can be really mean. "Bottoms" is a movie where no one can be considered a good person, but even the skeeziest of the main cast retains some degree of likability largely due to the talent and charisma of the actors. Rachel Sennott has seemingly become the new Natasha Lyonne — a straight actress who excels at playing disaster queers. Ayo Edebiri sells every punchline while also nailing her character's awkward relatability as someone you're rooting for even as she digs deeper into her screw-ups. That both Sennott and Edebiri are as far out of high school as Ben Platt was in "Dear Evan Hansen" works perfectly with the film's deliberately artificial style; all the gags satirizing the over-sexualization of high schoolers simply wouldn't be funny with actors who actually looked like high schoolers. The whole ensemble does a great job, from Ruby Cruz as the bomb-obsessed butch Hazel to Havana Rose Liu and Kaia Gerber as the popular girls our protagonists are pursuing.
The ending gets extra ridiculous
The weakest parts of "Bottoms" are those that have to attempt some degree of seriousness. It's here where the more cliché aspects of the story become an issue. These characters are entertaining to laugh at and fun to root for (sometimes against our better judgement), but they're not ones with enough depth to get particularly emotionally invested in. Certain attempts at pathos feel directly borrowed from "Booksmart" but don't make nearly the same emotional impact in this campier context. The parts where the protagonists' lies are revealed play out like every other movie where liars get revealed — though to its credit, the movie does have one particularly good needle drop to power through the generic "lowest point" montage.
To balance out there requisite dramatic bits, "Bottoms" ultimately ends up reaching new heights of camp absurdity in its ultimate climax. Without going into spoiler details, those who dislike over-the-top blood and gore might want to sit this one out. Basically all emotional realism goes out the window in the final moments, though you could look at the seemingly unbelievable conclusion as a natural extension of the film's satire on the American culture of violence.
Here's the part where I admit I'm an old person (30 years old, to be precise) and have no idea how this will all play with today's teenagers. "Bottoms" is both a throwback to a style of teen movie we don't really see much anymore and a satire that aspires to up-to-the-minute relevancy, so I'm curious how the younger crowd will feel about it. I can say that among the mostly millennial audience at the film's New York premiere at NewFest Pride, it was a reminder of how fun a raunchy comedy can be in a packed theater.
"Bottoms" opens in theaters on August 25.
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn't exist.