It’s pretty much as feared: while Channel 4’s ‘The Inbetweeners’ series delivers plenty of laughs in quickfire half-hour spurts, it fails miserably as big-screen comedy.
For those new to the show, ‘The Inbetweeners’ is a crude, lewd but very funny sitcom about four ‘clunge’-obsessed but socially inadequate teen schoolkids and their dick-led adventures with members of the opposite sex. The lads rarely venture beyond the confines of suburban London, but for this disappointing film outing they finance a lads’ holiday to Crete with some inherited cash. You can guess what’s going to happen from the moment they set foot in their ghastly holiday apartment block. There’s no story to speak of, and it mainly revolves around the four thrill-seeking lads’ earnest determination to have one hell of a good time.
Bespectacled nerd Will (
Simon Bird
) is the brightest of the bunch but has never had his end away and fumbles awkwardly in the presence of girls.
James Buckley
’s Jay is the opposite – a good-looking, sex-charged know-it-all who takes the lion’s share of the lewd language and foul expressions. And Neil (
Blake Harrison
) is the tall, quiet one with a strange fetish for getting it on with crusty old women. A subplot involving fourth member Simon’s (
Joe Thomas
) desperate desire to be back in the arms of his ex-girlfriend Carli (Emily Head) provides the only semblance of what you might call a storyline. They drink, they say ‘cock’ a lot, they wear bright pink T-shirts with ‘Pussay Patrol’ emblazoned on them, they fumble about with a quartet of English girls and they are threatened by a Greek waiter and a handsome studmuffin. All the traits and trappings of a typically decadent British holiday, then.
There are a few amusing moments – not least a dance routine they perform in order to pull some birds – but mostly it is nothing like as funny as the series and littered with failed gags and deadends. It’s as if regular writers Iain Morris and Damon Beesley had a sudden bout of writers’ block when faced with taking their trendy brainchild out into the world. Sadly, this is one to file next to ‘Ali G Indahouse’ in the pantheon of British TV comedies turned bad.