Bottoms * *

After her excellent debut from a couple of years ago -  Shiva Baby - I assumed director/writer Emma Seligman would be taking it to a new level with her next film.  She is, but the title of this film suggests where that level might be.

The High school teen comedy is a long standing genre which has produced some excellent dramas.  The Duff, The Edge of Seventeen, Eighth Grade.  And of late the genre has also included LGBTIQ issues which is good to see. There have been some fine examples of that: First Girl I Loved   Love Simon,  

But this thing....

Rule one, never talk about Fight Club.
Good idea.

I don't know what went wrong but it's like nearly every scene is half baked.  It is trying to be funny but it's just not working.  At least not for me.  In the genre of high school teen drama Bottoms would be the most irritating film I've seen since Booksmart.  Like that film, it seems to have an attitude of being "woke" is enough.

Basically it's about a couple of Gay/Queer girls - PJ and Josie  who attend a High School that is primarily obsessed with its male football team to the detriment of the rest of the school.

PJ and Josie have no interest in the football team.  They are obsessed with other girls.  Fair enough, they are a young and horny couple of gay girls.  And I guess the most interesting and amusing parts of the film is that the girls PJ and Josie fancy are the same girls the boys fancy - Hot Cheerleaders.

PJ and Josie get it in their head that such cheerleaders can't look after themselves and need some training. They decide to start a "Fight Club".  Disappointingly for them the only attendees turn out to be a few average looking girls.  "They're ugly", PJ and Josie complain. 

To prove their "Fight Club" has credibility, and it's not just for picking up hotties, they have to actually fight, and pretty soon they're going round with black eyes, cut lips and swollen noses.

After some time, the hotties turn up to their Fight Club and PJ and Josie can make their move. 

In the meantime, their friend and "third wheel" Hazel, gets to work undermining the dominating, irritating, arrogant football team, especially the captain.  To be honest, she is more interesting than PJ and Josie. 

There is a lot of inversion of sexual stereotypes and overturning of common presumptions in Bottoms, which should be welcome.  Lesbians chasing the same hotties as the boys. And the class teacher is a tattooed, jive talking needy guy who reads porn magazines. Like the rest of the cast, half the time he seems to be ad-libbing.  And the captain of the football team keeps gesturing in effeminate ways despite his alpha male appearance.

All this should work.  Unfortunately, most of the time it doesn't. At least it didn't for me.  But maybe I'm missing something, I don't know.