Good Boys asks us all to remember the imagination, adventure, and fear of pre-teen existence, and the urgent desire to grow up. It’s rude and crude, but Good Boys is also full of incredible warmth, laugh-out-loud humour and tenderness.
There is an inherent risk in placing adult comedy into the hands of a pre-pubescent cast. For many people, child actors, bad language, and sexual jokes can, and do, create an uncomfortable viewing experience. Good Boys, therefore, treads a challenging path, as it attempts to maintain the innocence and exploration of early-teen life with the more adult humour and energy of older-adolescent movies like Superbad and Booksmart. Thankfully, it’s a path writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky navigate brilliantly in Good Boys, a movie that pokes fun at the adult audience while taking them back to those heady days of their early teens, when the whole world felt like a scary adventure.
Despite its adult comedy, Good Boys maintains the innocence, false confidence and uncertainty of pre-teen life as kids attempt to unpick and explain the adult world around them through conversations wrapped in misunderstanding and made-up stories presented as fact. These final years of childhood, as teenage hormones begin to take hold, sit between two opposing worlds: the world of childhood imagination and escapism and the mysterious yet alluring world of adult experiences. It’s in that void between both of these worlds that we meet the Beanbag Boys, Max (Jacob Tremblay), Lucas (Keith L. Williams) and Thor (Brady Noon). These childhood friends are about to enter the scary world of 6th Grade (Year 7 UK). Each boy is aware of the scale of this transition and the need to be ‘cool’ and find their tribe both inside and beyond the school gates.
Max has a crush on Brixlee (Millie Davis), and he knows his one chance to become her boyfriend lies at the scary ‘kissing party’ being held by the ultra-cool kids at school. If he can’t get to the infamous kissing party, it’s all over for him, and his potential reputation as a 6th-grade stud. So, needing support and knowledge, Max enlists Lucas and Thor to discover how kissing works by cutting school and using his dad’s drone to spy on the older teenagers living on his street. However, the drone plan dramatically fails, and the boys find themselves in conflict with two older high school girls (Molly Gordon and Midori Francis) as their mission morphs into a tween road trip of self-discovery.
Directed by Gene Stupnitsky (The Office) and produced by Seth Rogen, Good Boys opens in familiar teen-comedy territory in a movie that regularly feels like a 21st-century homage to Chris Columbus’s Adventures in Babysitting (1987). Like that movie, it’s the ensemble cast that makes this film tick, with Tremblay, Williams and Noon maintaining a sense of pre-teen innocence despite the crude humour that threads through the journey we take. Here, childhood logic reigns supreme as our boys attempt to navigate the adult world while remaining firmly stuck in childhood, their notions and ideas subject to the rampant imagination of 11-year-old boys.
Good Boys asks us all to remember the imagination, adventure, and fear of pre-teen existence, and the urgent desire to grow up. It’s rude and crude, but Good Boys is also full of incredible warmth, laugh-out-loud humour and tenderness.
Follow Us