The Inbetweeners 2, Film Review. Picturehouse@F.A.C.T., Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Simon Bird, James Buckley, Joe Thomas, Blake Harrison, Tamla Kari, Belinda Stewart-Wilson, Freddie Stroma, Emily Berrington, Celeste Cotton, David Schaal, Adrian Palmer, Dominique Maber, Larissa Jones, Cameron Caulfield, George Hewer, James Kearney, Kai Pantano, Alex MacQueen, Martin Trenaman, Robin Weaver, Greg Davies.

It is impossible to ignore something forever and when you find yourself laughing at some of the absolute filfth that runs through the latest big screen adventure for the four lads who make up The Inbetweeners, you either have to check that you didn’t leave a vital part of your brain in a field surrounded by cattle licking it and getting a human high from it or ,making a mental check list to watch some of the episodes again to make sure that you just weren’t being an idiot for not enjoying it in the first place.

The four heroes are on a mission, life has not turned out the way they expected. University is a mix of shame, appreciation deficit or being completely strung out by the insane actions of the girl you followed or having been dumped by the girls you met the last time you were on holiday together. What better way to reassert life than travelling half way round the world and meeting up with a friend whose life seems golden and raindrop free.

Whilst the utter disturbing regard in which the main characters have at times for the rest of the planet there is something in which to like about the four lads, to be part of a tight group in which they forgive you being stupid, in which they are prepared to lay down their own life for you, even if they left you to be battered by two angry Australians over the kind of misunderstanding which should come with a warning sign and big red angry letters attached.

With jokes about sex, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, poo, dead dolphins and everything else in between, there is going to be something that will make anybody with a certain disposition look away in disgust but then have them laughing in tandem with the 70 year gran they somehow have sat alongside. If it can be said that American television can produce comedy gold but be completely awful when it comes reproducing it on film then the opposite can be said of British comedy. Television comedy in the U.K. muddles along between fairly awful and ignore completely, with the odd series creeping through the door, to its cinema which normally hits the mark every single time.

Perhaps the greatest accolade to give The Inbetweeners Two is that it would have disgusted that self-styled guardian of moral virtue Mary Whitehouse, it would have moved her not just to write several letters of complaint and set up pickets outside number ten, it would have seen her be so shocked that she might have given up the fight and move away, saying that Britain’s moral fibre was finished. If that was the case then The Inbetweeners should be among everybody’s film to see list over the next couple of weeks.

Ian D. Hall