Good Boys Review

The raunchy R-Rated comedy gets a new twist with the release of Good Boys by focusing on three 6^th Grade boys who have one wild day out.

Max (Jacob Tremblay), Thor (Brady Noon) and Lucas (Keith L. Williams) have been best friends since kindergarten despite having wildly different personalities. Max has started to develop an interest in girls, Thor is desperate to be a cool kid, and Lucas cannot break the rules. Max gets invited by the cool kids to his first kissing party which starts a chain of events that includes alcohol, drugs, sex toys, and a broken drone.

I went into Good Boys with a sense of dread. The Hollywood R-Rated comedy has been a wasteland where swear words, alcohol, and drugs are used as a substitute for writing jokes. And these fears are made worst because of the premise of the film where it seemed like the joke was just going to be pre-teens doing and saying raunchy things. It didn’t help that the film started like American Pie junior edition. Thankfully Good Boys is more than this and made me laugh harder than I have for a long time.

The reason why Good Boys works were the writers, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, made sure the main three characters were innocent and naïve enough to make their antics tolerable. Their rites of passage were to learn how to kiss a girl and drink a beer, and they had a child’s eye when looking at things like porn and Thor’s parents’ adult collection. When the trio found out they were in the procession of drugs their reaction was of shock. They worried about the physical effects and they could get in trouble if caught.

Good Boys had a focus on the theme of friendship. The boys were growing up. They have recently moved to a bigger school – their initial fears were that they would be outcasts and prove they are mature. But as the film progresses they fear that they might grow apart from each other. These themes of growing up and changing made Good Boys a bit like a live-action version of Netflix’s Big Mouth.

The plot of Good Boys was a combination of things. The writers used the template of an ‘80s teen comedy like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and spiced it up with cruder jokes. The trio skip school, get an item and avoid getting in trouble. The film also had elements of Superbad where a group of friends who want to go to the big party and this comparison inadvertently led me to think of Booksmart. Booksmart was more of an indie comedy compared to Good Boys’ broader approach but there was some connective tissue. Both films have a similar joke about looking at porn and both films share some cast members – Molly Gordon and Will Forte. However, Good Boys and Booksmart were made around the same time so these similarities were coincidental.

The final major comparison to be made is with American Dad. The basic plot revolves around the trio trying to get a drone before Max’s dad finds out what the kids did – similar to the episode “Home Adrone.” Plus the trio naively believes a sex doll is CPR doll, just like Steve and his friends in the episode “May the Best Stan Win.”

When it comes to the comedy Good Boys excels at big set scenes. The best scenes came when there was a long build-up to a payoff. The best examples of this were when the trio tried to cross the freeway and when they were in a frat house. I roared with laughter during those sequences.

If there was an issue to be had with the film it was that the kids did swear too much. It made sense that Thor would swear because he wants to be seen as cool, mature and bigs himself up – just like Jay from The Inbetweeners. But it doesn’t work for Jacob and Lucas, especially Lucas who is meant to be the character who obeys all the rules. Fortunately, the use of the f word was said when during emotional outbursts or was a reaction of shock – it isn’t used as a replacement for a joke.

I went into Good Boys with low expectations and it ended up being a blast.