Months of trailers and marketing have preconditioned us to go into Bad Neighbours thinking that Zac Efron and his frathouse of dudebros are the villains. I mean, look who they’re up against – new parents Mac and Kelly Radner, played by chill dude Seth Rogen and cool Aussie actress Rose Byrne, and their adorable baby daughter (she’s so frickin’ cute). The marketing tells us they’re villains because they’re the enemies of this nice, young nuclear family with a house in a good neighbourhood.
The marketing also tells us, among other things, that Zac Efron is hot. The film tells us that, too. Frequently. We’re told that he “looks like a gay guy built him in a laboratory.” That his “arms look like two veiny dicks.” That his abs look like “an arrow pointing down to his dick.” And, because showing is better than telling, we see Efron take his shirt off. Again. And again.
With his easy charm, Adonic physique and eyes in which to lose yourself, Efron is perfectly cast as the sadistic Achilles running Delta Psi Beta. It’s not just because he looks good – it’s because he looks good in a way that is eminently desirable and enviable; even if he is a jerk, he’s the kind of jerk who has a following you can understand, a following you might even join if you were a Dave Franco or a Christopher Mintz-Plasse or a Jerrod Carmichael.
Photo: Unknown
The frathouse he runs shares his allure, director Nicholas Stoller (Get Him To The Greek) playing it up as a debauched playhouse. Efron and Franco introduce the frat with a speech so rousing it belongs in a Disney sports film; the ruckus parties are all fluoros, UV lights and staccato editing; backyard piss-ups are shot from inside the Radner household looking out, a constant reminder of the tension between the frat and their ‘adult’ neighbours. Even when Stoller just plonks the camera down in the Radner household and lets Rogen and Byrne riff, the loose rhythm and immobile camera put them a world away from the reckless excitement just next door.
But Efron isn’t just a charming presence – he’s a shallow presence, too, an actor who’s never really there in the moment, never really playing the expected emotion in a naturalistic way. The consciousness of his ‘performance’ makes Teddy’s geniality, anger, sadism all feel, not like a front, but an approximation of ‘normalcy’, a stab in the dark at how to be. That performance also gives us a deeper connection to Teddy, though, because when Teddy drops it, even for a moment, we see flashes of who he really is – lost, anxious, wondering how to keep the momentum going.
Efron’s presence elevates Bad Neighbours in a lot of ways, complicating our allegiances and throwing everyone else’s flaws into sharp relief.
Efron’s presence elevates Bad Neighbours in a lot of ways, complicating our allegiances and throwing everyone else’s flaws into sharp relief. With someone more natural, Teddy’s role as villain would feel like a good fit, a natural expression of who the character was, and we’d never stop backing Team Radner; with Efron, we get those cracks, a way of seeing the man underneath.
That man we see is the best illustration of the film’s chief concern, ‘the end of the line’. Bad Neighbours explores those moments at the end of school, uni, an apprenticeship, signing a contract for a first job, a wedding day, childbirth - those moments when we look into the empty void beyond the now and get scared of losing what we have, scared of having to ‘mature’.
That’s why Efron’s a revelation – he makes a villain one of the film’s most relatable characters, letting us see that Teddy’s terrified he’s sunk everything into something that’s meaningless and fleeting. It’s also why he and his Vice-President, Pete (Franco, also handsome), are such effective counterpoints to the Radners.
Mac and Kelly (played by Rogen and Byrne with a tangible, recognisable insecurity) fumble their way through peace and then war with the frat, clumsily dropping slang like ‘trill’ and sticking out at frat parties, in order to prove to themselves that their daughter’s birth hasn’t brought them to the end of the line, made them ‘boring’ and ‘old’. Teddy and Pete do the same, but to preserve the family that will inevitably break apart at the end of the year. And while the film’s comedy flips relatively effortlessly between the awkward, gross parts of raising a baby and a sort of crass, earnest ‘Superbad Gone Wild’, the Radners and the frat find a common comic language in the violence, destruction and mindgames of mutual sabotage – and it’s those moments, when all characters are on the same psychological page, that the film is both at its funniest (see the running joke with the airbags, or the constant escalation during the final party).
Bad Neighbours is fantastically funny (bar a real gross, tonally bizarre breastfeeding scene) and surprisingly expert at playing audience anxieties for pathos and for jokes. The end of the line is looming for a lot of us, and Bad Neighbours is one of the funniest ways it’s ever been explored on film.
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