Bot­toms review – under­cooked, unfun­ny teen romance

When David Finch­er brought Chuck Palahniuk’s land­mark cult nov­el Fight Club to the big screen in 1999, he cre­at­ed a mon­ster. Brad Pitt’s Tyler Dur­den became an inspi­ra­tion to count­less dis­en­fran­chised men, appar­ent­ly lack­ing the media lit­er­a­cy to under­stand his par­tic­u­lar brand of faux-rev­o­lu­tion­ary nihilism was self-serv­ing and hol­low. It was also a foun­da­tion­al sex­u­al awak­en­ing for some, the homo­eroti­cism of see­ing men punch each oth­ers’ lights out prov­ing sim­i­lar­ly inspi­ra­tional for count­less queer peo­ple – men and women alike. The film comes full cir­cle with Emma Seligman’s sopho­more fea­ture Bot­toms, in which two queer teenagers decide to start their own high school fight club in hopes of seduc­ing the cheer­lead­ers they have a crush on.

PJ (Rachel Sen­nott) and Josie (Ayo Ede­biri) are ​“gay, ugly and untal­ent­ed”, at least accord­ing to the oth­er stu­dents at their peri­od non-spe­cif­ic high school, where they lust after pop­u­lar girls Brit­tany (Kaia Ger­ber) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), despite Brittany’s dis­dain for PJ and the pres­ence of Isabel’s jock boyfriend Jeff (Nicholas Gal­itzine). After an acci­dent involv­ing Jeff’s leg and Josie’s car, their social stock plum­mets even fur­ther, and the two have a brain­wave to cre­ate a female-only fight club in order to sal­vage their rep­u­ta­tions and pro­vide self-defence class­es to their fel­low students…and flirt with Brit­tany and Isabel, nat­u­ral­ly (not doing many favours to the preda­to­ry les­bian trope).

This is a scin­til­lat­ing premise for a teen movie – a genre that has become increas­ing­ly sat­u­rat­ed by het­ero­nor­ma­tive Net­flicks in recent years. Chan­nelling the cat­ty spir­it of Heathers, Mean Girls and Jaw­break­er, Selig­man admirably seeks to present teenage girls in all their gob­lin­core glo­ry (any­one who has ever been, or spent time around, ado­les­cent women will tell you they are much more fer­al than the major­i­ty of teen movies sug­gest), although the cast­ing of 28-year-old Sen­nott and Ede­biri as ​“ugly teenagers” does require sig­nif­i­cant sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. Oth­er­wise, the film’s ensem­ble is well cho­sen – Havana Rose Liu is a sweet, ethe­re­al love inter­est, while Mar­shawn Lynch’s pro­fes­sion­al­ly unpro­fes­sion­al teacher going through a divorce is a scene-stealer.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the cast is sad­dled with a half-baked script, which under­de­liv­ers on its promise of a queer, female fight club by seem­ing to for­get that’s a cru­cial ele­ment of the sto­ry. There are only a hand­ful of moments in the film that relate to the fight club, one of which is a cliché mon­tage sequence – the rest of the run time is padded with romance and comedic beats which rarely land. Sen­nott and Ede­biri (long-time friends of Selig­man) are gift­ed come­di­ans and actors, but there’s a curi­ous lack of actu­al jokes in the script and moments which appear to be impro­vised come across as under­cooked riff­ing between close off-screen pals rather than hav­ing actu­al comedic pay-off.

This could be for­giv­en if Bot­toms man­aged to be sub­ver­sive or inter­est­ing in oth­er ways, but the film quick­ly becomes a con­ven­tion­al roman­tic com­e­dy, hit­ting pre­dictable plot beats only to tack on a wild, bloody third act which comes out of nowhere and as a result feels unearned. It’s a great shame, because the world des­per­ate­ly needs more queer come­dies and com­ing-of-age films, and the cre­ative team here are clear­ly ambi­tious and tal­ent­ed, but Bot­toms is too mud­dled and mean­der­ing to pack a knock-out punch.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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